Halloween is a real break from the other 364 days. During non-Halloween days, unless we go to a masquerade party, we’re expected to be only the person we last were, the last time we checked.
Who we are takes some daily upkeep if we are to portray well the unique message of “me.” We maintain the character in careful detail. There’s a set of appropriate and a set of inappropriate behaviors, determined maybe by the individual, maybe by a long gone elder. It’s a good thing to look at the agreements we make. Anyway, we behave normally within narrow confines of expectation. Our behavior depends for its guidelines (and I am not putting up to question whether or not this is valid) on protocol, opinions, attitudes, schedules, locations, mannerisms, etc.
Sometimes we define our ranges of choice as per what is acceptable and within common acceptance. Like magazine subscription – I’ll take Bazaar, you’ll take Fly Fishing. It’s the material we use, be it from sheer creative thought or borrowed concepts, the material we use to create and project “me.”
The very thought of playing with this whimsically in “real” life can be unsettling. A doctor coming to work in a coconut bra and a grass skirt like in the movie musical, South Pacific. Uhhhh, Doctor? People might think you are mad.
Kids have a ball pretending, This probably makes them a step saner than we old coots who’ve given up on all that foolishness. I’ll be the pirate captain, she’ll be the damsel walking the plank, you be the flowers and Bobby will be the sun moving across the sky but really fast cuz were on another planet that’s all spiky where the sky is purple with orange clouds, and if you jump three times between the spikes that’s how you get magically transported to the mountain cave. Wo! and Jane’s going to be the dinosaur cracking out of a huge egg on top of the mountain. Remember how passionately each kid threw himself into those parts? There were intricate rules being made up and changed as we’d go along. The nanny can’t climb the forest vines holding onto the baby carriage! No fair! The baby? yes, the baby can fly. That is fun that a grown-up usually leaves behind.
We remember to this day Georges Sand, the woman in France sometime mid-late-1800’s, Frederick Chopin’s lover, who broke the rules by wearing men’s clothing and using a man’s name to publish (you sorta had to then, to be taken seriously). Georges, she was her own person – she didn’t care about convention and this dame was and still is the subject of much fascination. She got to create her own-chosen role.
We give each other these calling card surprises every now and then. Someone emerges to announce that his heart has always been, though he had denied it, in oceanography and the truck driver now takes a different road toward deep sea diving missions and marine research.
But normally most of us wake up who we were yesterday and put on the same kind of clothes, speak in the same accents, keep our names, don’t change species, etc. ;o)
Underneath or on the surface, I bet that we all have some urge to break away at least now and then. If we aren’t pursuing our passion (and if not, find and revive that and let nothing bar it) but if we’re not, then change is a real issue…we may crave it, we may have lost hope for it. It’ll be a hot issue.
And little changes and fun. like Halloween, give us some very wanted time-out. To vacate the usual in a vacation. To dream.
The photo: my eldest daughter at 11-years old dressed as a country grandpappy. No one recognized her in the neighborhood, she mocked that up so well.
Certain leeway is given in life and professions to varying “who” we are. The performing arts afford an opportunity to play freely with who one is being. I think that that is a wonderful aspect of those professions. Women, and I am one, manifest the urge to change with hair coloring and haircuts, with dressing like the ingenue, like the gardener, like a Playboy model (hmmm,, did I say dressed?). And women are expected to change like this…a perk of being a woman, if you ask me.
Still, we move around all too often in a rather narrow range of tolerable change. We don’t want to be too weird or, God forbid, unrecognizable.
The lady plant manager who has worn low black heels and a classic dark blue pants suit is not likely to show up one day in pigtails, neon short-shorts and bejeweled high-heeled sneakers. LOL! Might take a while before anyone “respects” her again, if she even keeps her job.
If Daddy comes home one day from work as a real cowboy who’s brought a few steer to graze in the backyard, who makes his coffee over a campfire there, sleeps outside on a wool blanket, cusses or spits anywhere and sings lonely cowboy laments for Rosie the Kalamazoo Barmaid and now he tawks lak dayat when he was a rather quiet Massachusetts Sears appliances salesman. We’d be freaked and figure that Dad had lost his marbles.
364 days of the year, “Who are you? doesn’t usually include a list of divergent creatures to choose from and there’s no “today” after the question – “Who are you…today?” :o) We don’t want to mess up our contact list. Worked hard to create and project that “me” and get well connected. We built a reputation and being recognized, known, relied upon, connected…all that is of immense value. It makes perfect sense to maintain stability and predictability.
It does, I know. I’m just throwing in one for the occasional, light-hearted break.
Of course, I don’t mean breaking commitments and going nuts. I mean a welcome mat out for the imagination. It’s liberating and fun. I think it’s healthy to be able to imagine ourselves, as we did when we were kids, as…well, as anything. I refuse to relinquish my self-stamped passport to PLAY and, frankly, I’m aware that this makes me a lot younger mentally and spiritually than I might otherwise be.
Isn’t it funny, too? The world changes -that’s a given. Nothing, of at least physical things, remains the same and unmoved. From the most solid mountain of rock to the essentially nearly immaterial parts of parts of parts of things. Yet, do we ever resist change! We don’t want to lose ground, feel unstable, etc.
How well we do is how well we tolerate changes and motion. It is highly practical to be able to move with a new set of criteria. There should be room for an individual’s judgment and freedom of choice. Any rule or policy carved deeply in marble should be able to be challenged based upon observation and judgment, don’t you think? Maybe the law would (and usually should) hold. Possibly an exception is called for.
Kind of a mixed bag, eh? Stability — change. Holding a position – ready to make a needed move. Living skillfully involves both. Holding to truth, but looking right now rather than opting to use yesterday’s perception.
The valuable ingredients are courage and a spirit of play.
Back to Halloween! I love it and am all for having fun with changing who we are for the night and playing with things that are normally so set in stone, I squirm.
I think that Halloween is such a widely enjoyed holiday because I am not alone in this leaning. We have a love affair with changes and the novel (the new). Fantasy fiction, movies, cruises, video games, theme parks and such are popular. Films about people who bring about big changes because they found they wanted something else after all bring a sense of liberation, don’t they? Peter Pan who tore the kids away from Always-Predictableland to NeverNeverland where there’s constant need for flexible assumption of what is “me.” Overboard, where Goldie Hawn, the snotty, spoiled heiress morphs into as Annie, the floor-scrubbing plebian wife and mother – such fun.
At Halloween , we have sanction to be something different. It’s understood that anyone and anything can ring your doorbell. An alien monster, a pirate cap’n, a rock with a crop of lovely moss on top, a butterfly princess, a glow-in-the-dark skeleton, a hick, a Marie Antoinette, a gypsy, Shakespeare, a carrot…you name it. A night to play “I am a ……” and not be rounded up by the men in little white suits.
What if… people just took a vacation from their “me” every now and then, turn in a slip, “a new me day” and come to work as a lobster or wearing Hobbit garb? The world would smile more, don’t you think? And it might be great to come back, then, to “me.”
Okay, granted the site boss doesn’t want his construction crew to show up for work as gelatinous plasma-men. But it’s just a wild and fun thought, eh?
If you feel like sharing a “New Me” that this has perhaps inspired thoughts of, or any Halloween story, or anything at all, I’d love to hear! Mine might be an out-of-doors painter in about 1875 France. Or a jellyfish. For a day, what a gas.
Hugs!
Evan ?www.evansgarden.com