We are all elaborations

It was a very hot Saturday a few weeks back when I decided to do a meandering 10-ish mile walk around town.

For this one I decided to pull up an old faithful — the Hidden Brain podcasts — and this particular episode, "Who Are You, Really?", got its hooks in me and hasn't really let go. This happens when I have the time to truly ruminate, and usually aided by an episode from Hidden Brain or RadioLab.

Anyway, here's where my head has been.

Every living thing can be traced back to a single ancestor. Biologists call it LUCA, the Last Universal Common Ancestor, the cell that all the rest of us turn out to be variations on. And I keep turning that over, because it means I'm not actually a starting point so much as a continuation, an elaboration on something that was already well underway before I got here and will keep going long after, a very long sentence of which I happen to be a few words.

And it's not even that I'm one single thing in the present tense. The cells I'm made of are carrying around the descendants of organisms that used to be separate but merged so far back that the merger quietly became the equipment, which means now I'm running on a partnership I never actually agreed to. Which makes my body, if I really sit with it, a lot less of an I and a lot more of a we that has gotten very good at sounding like one.

And that does something to how I think about consciousness, too. Maybe it isn't a thing I have so much as something I'm doing, constantly, mostly without noticing, an ongoing orchestration of a lot of separate parts held together just well enough that the whole arrangement seems to speak in a single voice.

Lately I've even been able to hear some of the parts.

There's a cellular self, older than any language, just running the machinery. An animal self underneath the thinking, that wants things and fears things and reaches for things. A linguistic self that takes all of that and turns it into sentences. A philosophical self that turns right back around and starts questioning the sentences. And a spiritual self that quietly suspects the one asking the questions isn't the whole story either.

I move between all of them over the course of an ordinary day, and I'd guess you do too, probably without clocking the switch any more than I usually do.

The longer I live, the more I think it's really worth learning to notice which one of them is doing the talking at any given moment. And in the same breath, as far as I can tell, not one of them is actually… me. They feel more like vehicles, or maybe just conveniences, as the expert on the episode said, ways of getting around and negotiating this particular stretch of being alive. Apparently I can be sitting inside one of them without being it. It's a strange, quiet kind of freedom, and not the one I would have predicted. I always sort of assumed that knowing yourself meant digging down until you finally hit the real self under all the rest of it, and what I'm landing on instead is that there's someone doing the digging who isn't any of it, who was maybe never any of the vehicles to begin with.

Which, it turns out, is more or less what I do for a living. Just usually with organizations instead of with myself.

Because a company is also a we that's learned to talk like an it. It has its own version of a cellular self, the unglamorous work that keeps the lights on, and an animal self, the things it wants and the things it's quietly afraid of, and a linguistic self, the story it tells about who it is, and then a few more layers underneath those that almost never get said out loud. And most of what I actually get called in to untangle, once you're down under it, is some confusion about which of those layers is doing the talking.

That's not far from how we think about the work at Selvage. Before you can change what an organization does, you have to be able to see the layers it's actually made of and notice which one is driving, because none of them are the whole thing, and it's hard to move on purpose until you can tell them apart.

Anyway. That's what one podcast on one long walk one Saturday did to me. Sigh.