I recently watched John Cena’s Peacemaker S2. To my mind, DC’s best recent work, Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker notwithstanding. It aired around the same time as John Cena’s WWE retirement tour, and I couldn’t help but notice the overlap of Cena’s WWE persona and the character – flawed, often clueless, but fundamentally good-hearted. Not everyone saw it that way though. A minority commented on his past politics in WWE, how he’d used his power to hold others back. Fair, I thought. But incomplete.
Because it reminded me, again, that character isn’t a monolith. Like Heraclitus’ perspective on neither you nor the river being the same in season 2. I’ve thought about this a lot because in the early and mid years of my life thus far, I wasn’t a good person to people. At work and in life. Not from malice. Mostly because I was operating from a scarcity mindset. I prioritised other things – survival, proving myself, protecting territory I thought was fragile. I’ve apologised to some of them recently. Not to fix anything, just to acknowledge.
A post on LinkedIn – about the different things that drive us at different points, and their shelf lives – made me think a little more on that scarcity. As I commented, “like all chips, you need to upgrade the one on your shoulder at some point. But it requires self awareness.”
A related shift is that I try not to evaluate others based only on who they were when I knew them. People evolve outside my field of vision. Obviously. But it took time to internalise. Now when I see that growth, I tell them. To quote Maggie Smith, “…shine on someone else- the light will reach you, too.”
She meant her quote positively – about generosity creating its own returns, but I realised it could be seubverted. When you shine light on others, acknowledging they’re not fixed in time, you’re also illuminating your own impermanence. The chips will keep coming. They’ll keep needing replacement. Will there be a time without chips? When character finally becomes that monolith. The person who is comfortable in their own skin and can handle with grace everything life throws.
A part of me thinks it is possible, based on recent experiences. Maybe it’s the confidence of being in the midst of those “series of small hills, gracefully undulating until the end” that I wrote about half a dozen years ago. Or maybe it’s the fledgling abundance mindset that has been easier to cultivate because of our retirement planning, and the ‘bubbles’ we can afford to stay in.
Another part is more circumspect. In a coincidence that made me really believe that there is some energy that puts us in scenarios to teach us lessons, I was dragged out of one such bubble – reserving a table and going early enough for dinner so traffic or the loud crowds in eateries won’t be as much a bother. Stuck in a <200m stretch for more than 45 mins with friends, I became the grumpy self I thought I had thankfully lost. Irritated by my own decision-making but blaming others (in my mind) as well. The ‘scarcity’ was that we would be late, wouldn’t get the table we had booked, and wouldn’t get a table in any other place because it was V-Day! Since I am usually the joke-cracking persona, the change is easily visible to others, and hurts them. I apologised later in the evening, but it was a painful reminder – that when taken out of my carefully constructed bubbles, I could regress to an older self. Which made it seem as though I was simply playing a character within the bubble. The ego of my self image, as someone who is always in control, is alive and well. That’s a chip too.
The extrapolation is that AI could always take the bubbles away by changing the political, societal, and financial scaffoldings the plan assumed. Adversity doesn’t just shape character, it surfaces it too. So, all things considered, I’ll know how much I have progressed only when the chips are down.
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