Fool's gold

Having an identity means associating myself with characteristics that are peculiar to me or to a group of people like me. It's a disaster. It automatically separates me from anyone who does not share that characteristic. It also leaves me vulnerable, defensive, alarmed, and lonely.

Technically, I have an ethnicity (actually more than one), a religion, a socioeconomic background, a current socioeconomic status, a biological sex, maybe a cultural gender, etc., but none of these are me. I have in front of me a red and orange keep cup. I'm not a red-and-orange-keep-cup-owner. It's not my identity. Those other characteristics, in as far as they even exist except as a generalised construct, are not my identity, either. They're adjacent factors; accoutrements; tools; artefacts of the body.

Even my story is not me. It's a narrative about where I've been. Identify with the narrative and I'm sunk, because, to maintain the identity, I need to maintain the narrative, which is why the same scenarios keep being recreated, with the ending never changing. If the end changes, none of the previous iterations were doomed to end the way they did: the door was always unlocked. If I am my story, and the story evaporates, what's left?

I saw a fox yesterday. Sleek, alert, unafraid, roaming central London streets. I saw the same fox, later, dead by the side of the road. What am I? I am the fox, the moon, the weevil, the people around me, the energy of photons. Matter is more energy than matter: forces, not substance. If I am me, and the fox is the fox, the fox is of no concern to me. If I am the fox, which I am, then a new universe heaves into view. I could no more willingly harm the fox than I could myself.

If I have no separate identity, no separate interests, no separate welfare, no separate being, my decision-making will be for the good of all, now and a thousand generations into the future, not for the good of the invented me I'm clinging to like a dead snakeskin. Decisions will be made not for me but for myself and for others, for foxes, who are no less me than me, for all other beings, from now until the end of time.

All else is folly.