If I were I asked to explain the word ”identity” by means of a song I would suggest, ”He’s got the whole world, in His hands He´s got the whole wide world…” No, I´m not doing a Billy Graham and that was not meant in a religous way although religion is not to be excluded. It is only recently I have begun to realize the intensely complicated and powerful effect this word posseses.
Intensely complicated you might ask questioningly? One look at your identity card or passport and there you have it. Difficult to disagree with the information presented there and what is seen in the document should more than just roughly coincide with the person in front of you which of course is the object of the exercise. In that sense a case of true and I imagine unique identity. There may be exceptions to this I am aware but how many brown or blue-eyed John Smiths born in London on a specific day of any one year are there? Now, despite this rather touching view as to who I am according to my passport there is undeniably a larger everchanging picture and the greater the number of pixels in that picture the more complicated it gets.
Life has its own system of benchmarking and all along we have little choice other than to generally accept, adjust to and interpret who we are. Everchanging, not only in the mirror and even then sadly not only due to the latest hairdo. From infant to child, from child to adult, from girl to woman, from boy to man. As adults we are engaged in any one of a million groups from work, business or pleasure. We pride ourselves in a combination of our choices and our heritage. Not unlike a salesman though, we do like to overemphasize positive things and very often play down the weaker side of our nature resulting in a self-image through rose tinted glasses. Much like, as an animal lover conveniently forgetting you throw things at the neighbour´s cat because it shits in your garden. This points to a number of other character traits without necessarily making you less of an animal lover although the neighbour might be forgiven for not seeing it that way.
On a more personal basis I have few problems concerning identity although I am sure people find this hard to understand. It all started out pretty straightforwardly with a German father and mother then getting slightly more complicated when I found myself in England at the age of three under the auspices of a lieutenant colonel stepfather. Very soon my mother tongue faded from memory only to be revived on infrequent summer holiday visits to adorable grandparents. My heritage I bore in my name and the undying support for, ”die Mannschaft” in an otherwise total English setting. I rarely experienced any anti-German feeling at school or anywhere else for that matter and felt British in the hanoverian sense often casting a thought to a distant relative who commanded the King´s German Legion at the battle of Waterloo.
Believe it or not things got even more complicated when the publishing company I was working for in London sent me to Scandinavia to set up an office and 48 years later I realize I have become more Swedish than anything else without actually being a Swede, unlike my wife, my three children and my five wonderful grandchildren.