Self-Discovery

If you run a search on Google for my name (in quotation marks), ten links will turn up. You’re likely to find among them four links that refer to me as an actress (15 seconds of fame in a fabulous indie film done in 2005 called Big Time). There will also be a link to my Friendster account, which I haven’t properly used in about 3 years. The rest, well… One’s a link to a petition I once signed barely a year out of uni and another’s got my ICQ number on it (read: high school).

The other three links on that first Google results page are most definitely not me. I don’t have a friend named China and I am not a parek (whatever that may mean). I most certainly am not a 58-year-old Safeway cashier in Honolulu and Hilo who is now dead.

So, having embarked upon this voyage of self-discovery, I have… discovered what I am and what I am not. I’ve also learned (or affirmed) the following:

1. I’m dated (to say the least).
2. I haven’t done much to merit distinction online apart from saying “We saw a movie last Sunday.”

Of course I’m defensive – what’s an online search anyway? I really get into the cop-out justification with talk of how Google searches actually work, and how… Well, I trail off. Because at the end of the day, that’s really all the tired words add up to: a cop-out.

The real question I should be asking myself is after all these years, what have I accomplished? Like really accomplished?

I do a quick search in my brain – the little bits of memory wedged in between the crates that’ve moved about the attic of my mind. Among the uncountable oddities I find up there, I can’t muster even one itty bitty bit of rolled-up scroll that ever merited a proper fanfare and left a lasting impact. Nothing.

I may find myself waist-deep in life not having done a thing. A real thing.

In a juvenile moment years ago, I said (without actually understanding it, I think) that regret about something you did may, in the end, be better than regret about something you didn’t do. At least by acting you made a decision. Not doing anything, now that… I suppose may be the way to go in some situations. But I’ve found that more often that not, status quo is one of the ingredients of disaster. Letting life happen to you instead of happening to life. What a mistake. What an awful, awful mistake. God gave us this life to do something with, not to bury in the ground.

A wise woman told me recently that we make decisions the best we can based on what we know, and that once we decide, we have to own it. We have to know that what we’re doing is right and trust ourselves to make the right decisions. Any decisions we make that have… unfavorable… outcomes we charge to experience. We learn from them and move on.

So what’s the point? Not so much to have my name show up on a Google search page for things I’ve done recently that I actually worked for… things that meant the world to me (would be nice, but no…). It’s about much more than that.

In View from the Top, Mike Myers tells his class of flight attendants that there is a dollar taped to the bottom of each of their chairs. He instructs the students that these dollars are theirs–they just have to get them. Everyone gets out of his seat, finds that dollar and sits back down. The moral of the story?

You gotta get off your ass to make a buck.

And so the buck stops here. Asses come unglued from chairs, no more living life like a sinking stone, no more letting life pass busily by.

To do something – no, not just do – to work for something, to want something enough to fight for it and to fight so hard for it that it does come to pass – to make even just one person’s life that much better, and better if many – that’s the point.

And, possibly, to find a clearer, more accurate and more sensible gage of my life’s progress than Googling myself.