Finding or Creating?

Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself. George Bernard Shaw.

This motto is featured for September on the calendar that hangs in our bathroom—and we do have to go, therefore I expect to read this for a few more days yet.

So what’s my take on this? I disagree—and yet I don’t. In my youth GBS—as we affectionately called this famed playwright, an Irishman who made his fame in England—was still riding high for such creations as Major Barbara, Pygmalion, Man and Superman, and many other delightful plays. What survives of him these days is mostly that wondrous film, My Fair Lady, which is the play Pygmalion remade as a musical and filmed. Alas, they changed the ending—but that, folks, is Hollywood. In the 1950s, when I was cutting my teeth as it were, the progressive, ironic, socialist spirit GBS represented still powerfully influenced the young. And, I must say, still lingers on—else my calendar’s publishers would not have used this slogan to, as it were, make my September.

But I disagree. The notion is flattering and resonates with the ethos of the time. It also resonates with youth. With age we tend to, I believe, turn the slogan around. We’re lucky if we manage to emerge from the darkness and the chaos and discover the core of ourselves, which is there all along, created by someone else. Life much more resembles education than creation. The roots of education are “to draw or to lead out,” from dux, the leader or commander, and ex-, out. Something is present—but it must be freed from its shrouding and made visible, made to emerge.

And yet I don’t. I don’t if I closely examine what “creation” really means in the human context. It is definitely not “bringing into existence” something that is not and never has been. Human creation is a kind of discovery, a kind of finding and arranging what is already present. At best we discover a hidden treasure. But we didn’t make it.