You get a strange feeling when you’re about to leave a place. You won’t just miss the people you love and the memories you’ve made, but you’ll miss the person you were then, at that time and place, because you’ll never be that way again. You carry the lessons you learn with you to every new destination, but your identity, it changes with where ever you go. After all, where you are, literally and figuratively, differentiates one moment from the next. As a first time on campus student, I do not yet know who I am at Stern. My first few months here have been a blur of wandering; the first phase of a mission to color in my blank identity. A new place offers a chance at a different me, and over my next four years at Stern, I hope I can add a dimension to who I am.
My initial exploration at Stern has involved scanning endeavors I want to undertake and values I want to integrate. The values at Stern range from social to educational to religious. While I attempt to filter which values I want to espouse and which I want to exclude, I notice one dangerous value that threatens to creep into me. The urban culture that pervades the people of New York City tries to make its way through the empty slots of Stern’s revolving doors and permeate all of our perspectives: the culture that emphasizes a person’s image and his level of ownership. Those values are dangerous, for an inflated image can result in a deflated self and excessive ownership can reduce a person to just another object.
With Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, it has become the norm to have several webpages, complete with photos, likes, dislikes, and followers, a constant audience, all devoted to one person: me! But, we would be deluding ourselves if we believed that our friends on Facebook were befriending us, and our followers on Twitter and Instagram valued who we are. Facebook and Twitter are our attempts to reduce ourselves to an image, our ideal representation. What is Instagram if not a literal transformation of people into portraits? With so many profiles, perhaps our paraphernalia outlives who we actually are.
An image is the antithesis of an individual. True to its name, a still shot captures what cannot move or change. On the contrary, life differentiates itself from death in its unique ability to accommodate growth and development. Additionally, where as an image is confined to its frame, it’s four borders, life is defined by the ability for a living being to overflow the boundaries of his body and the frame of his inner world, and impact the environment and people around him. Last, an image has the ability to be adjusted to reach perfection. Imperfection, making mistakes, falling, failing getting it wrong; that is what it is to be human. That is what leaves room for hope.
In American culture, only what is quantifiable merits meaning. A person is summarized by his net worth, and the price of one’s suit has become the measure of the man. However, whereas in our society, things are valued only when they are describable, in the world of spirit, things are valued when they are indescribable. What is eternal is not what is seen, it is what is done. What lives on cannot be possessed, only given.
Last year I had the privilege of traveling to Poland and touring what is left of the Jewish communities and concentration camps that were destroyed in the Holocaust and the years thereafter. I saw what the Germans stole from our grandparents; they took the quantifiable, their shoes, their clothes, their money, even their time. Despite the German’s every attempt to dehumanize our grandparents, their humanity triumphed. Our grandparents survived on sharing hope, as that was all they could offer one another; connection was their lifeline. They flourished on faith, and the light in their lives was their loyalty to morals outside themselves. When their props and their scenery in the play of life disappeared, it was their roles become critical. Their characters became essential.
The contrast between what I observed months ago in Europe and what I face everyday in New York is moving. King Solomon taught us that there is nothing new under the sun. The sun set yesterday and will rise again tomorrow. The trees have watched winters and summers pass. The skies have been witness to generations coming and generation going. But the earth—it’s hard to believe that the earth that hosted our grandparents’ hollow hell is the very same one that hosts our hearty homes.
Before I know it, Stern will be my second home. One day, when I leave this home, I want the identity I struggle to leave behind to be one that is intrinsically valuable and not just extrinsically expensive. My piece of advice to myself and to my fellow classmates on campus is to remember what it is that makes us important. Don’t allow the excess and appearances that surrounds us to delude us into viewing the world as a place created to satisfy arrogance and entitlement. The world is a place better suited to satisfy learning, curiosity and loving-kindness.
I am not writing a request to reject everything contemporary society has to offer. Rather, this is a plea to proceed with caution—to find the point of intersection between imagery, ownership, individuality and action. To find their place of convergence in the expression of artful ideas, enduring values and transcendent connection. To remember that what we have and how were seen is not nearly as important as who we are. Because when the show is over, the curtain closes, the costumes are taken off, the spotlight goes dark and the audience goes home. What live on are the actors, the parts they played, and their impact on those who watched.