Personality

I’ve been thinking back to some of my favorite 90s movies.

Do you remember Heat? That was a quality flic.

I was compelled to share in a meeting that addiction feels like a scene in that movie. Deniro’s character tells Pacino’s character to not get attached to anything he can’t walk out on in 30 seconds flat if he feels the heat around the corner.

When you are suffering from addiction, no attachment matters as much as your attachment to what you are addicted to. This, I think, explains so much of what is inexplicable in the personality of addiction. There is no sense in reasoning with someone who is that willing to cut and run.

This bizarre sense of attachment is not limited to an addict’s relationship with drugs. I’ve felt equally attached to other things in sobriety. I became so obsessed with coaching football, for example, that I spent most of the football season in my head, thinking about plays and how to dissect different defenses.

An infamous memory from that era of my life is at the dinner table sometime in some October right before playoffs. My wife asked me a question about my day and I replied to her with the name of a play in our playbook. I can’t to this day tell you what she asked me, but my mind was so attached to thoughts on strategy that I replied in football language — a sign I might want to move on from the game.

These mental attachments that addicts experience are particularly gripping when there is a physical reaction attached to them, of course. Drugs are so easy to get addicted to because the physical reaction is nearly immediate. As a counter example, I experienced a physical peak to my mental attachments to the game of football once a year, during the championship game. We won four in a row. Once you know how good it feels to prove yourself the best, it’s easier, not harder, to find the motivation to bring that feeling home. A lot of people don’t understand why championship athletes don’t retire after winning it all. Those people don’t understand addiction.

I am more aware of my attachments than most other people because my mental attachments to drugs and alcohol nearly killed me. I reached that point described in Heat. There was nothing I wouldn’t walk out on in 30 seconds flat if the fix was around the corner. Nothing. As a result, I was morbidly depressed. I wanted to die.

And now, here I am, approaching 15 years clean and sober this October, God willing. 

And I write God willing here not to be cliché. God is the force that has broken so many of my unhealthy attachments. In my experience of the pursuit of joy, I don’t know any other force with the same power or strength. In a world that only believes in what it sees, people don’t recognize this invisible power in all of us that is desperate to want only what is best for ourselves. 

Once I experienced it, there was no denying the proof I saw all around me. And I’m not talking burning bushes, here. 

Take a child for example. The child doesn’t even have to be yours. Just think of any child. This child will share all sorts of similar characteristics with her parents: physical traits, mannerisms, accents. But what cannot be explained is how that child, despite all of her similarities to her parents, is absolutely her own person. Already, my three-year-old has a personality unique to herself. She is The Nugget. And no one can deny that. I can try and shape certain things in her character, but I — including all those genes I gave her — cannot shape the raw material from which her character will form. 

I really want to insist on this last point. Okay. Yesterday, this soon to be three year old nugget of ours pushed me aside when we walked by the koi pond at the local herb shop. “You too big, daddy. They eat me. I’m little.” Then she thrust her little hand into the water to let the fish nibble at her fingertips. This may not seem like much, but I guarantee you could clone my daughter’s DNA, have that clone shadow her every step, learn her every movement and decision, and yet: when passing by a koi pond on that random summer day, it is impossible that clone would have that thought and express it with such force. We can’t control much about the personality of our children.

And why would we want to? I have such a limited scope of possibility when it comes to my children. If I had it my way, they’d all be super obedient and polite little parrots. How tragic! Clearly, there is a reason and purpose for her becoming exactly the kind of person that pushes an adult away from koi so the koi could feast on her instead. Try and get to know a child without believing in the power of personality. It’s impossible! 

You cannot explain away personality and the direction that personality takes in the lives of young people. You can make every argument imaginable about social behavior, evolutionary biology, genetic probability, but you can’t imagine who a person will become. None of those disciplines can ever predict the most interesting aspect of being human: we are given a personality unique to our souls. 

And I am supposed to believe that this beautiful tapestry of human potential was woven at random? That something as wondrously unpredictable as my daughter’s soul originated in a dumb collision photons?

It makes far better sense for me to believe in God. And believing in God is a relief. I don’t have to solve the world’s problems. I can’t even have the ultimate authority over these little souls who live in our home. 

But what about the physics of the universe?

I read this great Neil deGrasse Tyson book over the summer.

It is unbelievable how far into the universe astrophysicists can reach. But even Tyson has to admit that while the big bang is more precisely understood each year, the force that brought those elements into collision will remain a mystery. 

This is where I have a leg up on the brightest astrophysicist. Is it really a mystery? Is it really possible a force other than God collided the precise elements together billions of years ago to form the single-celled organisms that became creative consciousness? That force has chosen to remain anonymous, yet gave us the ability to understand everything in its universe, aside from the source itself: the best part. Just like we can groom our children according to our own values, aside from their personality: the best part.

Postulating that the big bang is proof God doesn’t exist is like claiming we can control the personality in our children. Both theories fail to account for the raw material of the universe and soul, alike.

When Cat Stevens sang that there are “a million ways to go,” he was wrong. There are 7 billion ways to go. And those ways continue to expand ad infinitum, just like the universe.

I apologize for the tangent. 

I’m gearing up for the school year. And each time I do that, I am reminded that the best moments in the classroom are not planned; they don’t fit into my scope and sequence; they aren’t scheduled on my syllabus. 

Empirical evidence from experience in life continues to affirm that, whether it be in astrophysics or parenting, the best stuff lies outside of our control. And that stuff is proof of the existence of a higher authority behind things both infinite and infinitesimal.