Εγώ

I often try to remember the way I thought as a child, in an attempt to understand better and put myself in the place of young children and students. I find that one often remembers a lot of things about their childhood, incidents, conversations, places, people and objects, but it is very hard to try and remember how one thought about things when they were children. The pattern of thought established over the years seems to overtake and conceal the early paths of childhood thought. If I do not do this, I often find myself getting quite frustrated at the apparent self-centred demeanour of young students and at the inflexibility of opinion in teenage students. But if I try and remember some of the ways in which I thought as a child, then I am able to harvest much more patience towards seemingly unfounded behaviour because I begin to understand, or rather I begin to remember, how things seemed to me when I was a child.

One of the things that pops in my mind first, is the trouble I had as a child of comprehending the idea of identity and of people having more than one role. A very vivid example and one that I find embarrassing thinking about today, was my profound confusion over the character of James Bond. I remember someone commenting that Sean Connery was great playing James Bond in Goldfinger. Then my mother said that Ian Fleming had created the character of James Bond. And then that Ian Fleming had based James Bond on real people he had met during his service as an intelligence officer. So it was: Sean Connery is James Bond (who is based on many other people) in Ian Fleming's Goldfinger. I remember asking repeated questions about that, of who is who, and many adults explaining it to me, but not doing a great job, as I kept on it for ages, till people shushed me or laughed. I also had trouble establishing the fact that people had more than one role and more than one name to describe them, all at once. That they could be a man, and a father, and a son and a brother and a teacher and a husband and a gardener and so on. I felt that the more roles they had the more complicated they were thus the worse they would be at it, so that someone who was only a man, a son and a teacher, was definitely better than someone who was a hundred things all at the same time. If it was possible that someone was only a man or only a teacher that would be the best of all; but I saw that that was impossible by definition. The difficulty of comprehending the complexity of human identity which I demonstrated as a child, lies I think in the very strong sense that children have of their own self. It's because they have such a powerful and clear sense of their own self, that it is very hard for them to see the world from other people's points and put themselves into other people's place, so that their actions and behaviour often appear to adults as egocentric and lacking in empathy.

This very clear and strong sense of the self that children demonstrate, is often reflected in their teenage years through their opinions and beliefs on different issues. These opinions are often expressed in a black and white manner, are very categorical and inflexible and the teenager is adamant that their opinion will never change and that nothing that might happen in the future will ever alter their mind. The reason for this, lies I think in the difficulty of children to project themselves into different situations, environments and circumstances and due to their lack of experiences purely based on their age, it is extremely hard for them to see things in any other way than what feels and seems to be right for them, there and then. And because things feel and seem extremely clear to them at the time, they are very passionate that they will never change their mind about them and will always feel the same, no matter what.

When I remember it, I am often very reminiscent of this power, of feeling a hundred percent sure of something, of feeling invincible and certain and of the naivety and innocence of the belief that everything which is done with good intentions is bound to come to a good end. I remember an incident which happened during the Yugoslav war in my home town in a suburb of Athens. I think it must have been around 1993, but it could have been slightly earlier. The Yugoslav wars were very much part of our lives in Greece for several years and the coverage on the radio and television was extremely extended, detailed and constant. Everyone was following the developments of the wars, especially the Bosnian war, as if there was a war in our own country and the radio in our home and most homes was on all the time with the news. At some point there was a war alarm and everyone went to buy canned goods and bottled water from the supermarkets as news had it that the war would reach the Greek region of Macedonia. By the time I got to the supermarket with my grandmother, all that was left were jarred caper leaves and sweetened condensed milk cans.

Many operations were organised to send help to the refugee camps, by schools, churches and bigger organisations, in the form of blankets, canned food, clothes and bottled water. I took an active part in collecting and packing the aid goods at the local youth centre and it was a very uplifting and rewarding experience. What I really liked about it, was that I knew who was offering what, and I often saw fellow kids donating their dolls, or men I knew giving their old coats and ladies giving their household blankets. Everything was put in big crate boxes, and things had to be layered a certain way, so that blankets were at the bottom, followed by a layer of canned good, then more clothes, then tins again, then coats and so on and so forth. We managed to fill several large boxes and together with boxes filled from the neighbouring suburb, a whole van was filled ready to be send to the border. We were told the people would have the goods within the next two weeks and that the boxes would be delivered by air. At that point I felt that for the first time I was doing something other than listening to the radio in the night and worrying about the people of Yugoslavia, doing nothing at all to help them.

Ten days later, news came with visual images in the television, that due to a mistake several tonnes of aid goods were dropped upon a refugee camp in the border, resulting in the death of an unknown number of civilians, mainly women and children. I was never certain whether our boxes were amongst the aid dropped on the refugee camp, (but I did see images of stuffed toys, blankets and tins amongst dead bodies). Apparently our boxes were passed on to an international organisation and it was impossible to track them. But the fact was, that I was left unable to comprehend how a fundamentally positive and good willed action could have turned like that and in my desperation to understand it, I blamed it on war, giving war itself an evil personification, so that such bad and unfortunate and unfair things could surely be happening because war/evil was on. That gave me a bit of a peace of mind for a while, having something evil to blame when things went wrong, but when my child's mind started to notice that unfair and bad things were happening all the time, everywhere, regardless of whether there was a war on, and even if there was no evil around, then I was totally at a loss of how to proceed with understanding the world. Now that my earlier understanding of cause and effect was shaken, now that there was no guarantee that an action that had started with good intentions and hard work would necessarily end well, I came to notice an element of randomness and fickleness and uncontrollability, that could easily defy logic, faith and everything in between.

Of course, that worked both ways, and it could equally happen with positive things, so that the element of the unknown, of a surprise, a coincidence, luck or whatever it could be called, could become an incredibly magical thing. I thankfully noticed that also, so that I could now start perceiving myself as a person in the world who was bound to be affected by their surroundings and by circumstances. At some point I let myself see the world from as many points of view of other people as I could possibly imagine and I tried my best to put myself in the position of people whose opinions I completely and passionately disagreed with. I was hoping that in this way I could begin to understand how and why they may think the way they do and how that was justified in their own eyes. I became so good at that though, so detached from my own views and beliefs, that I lost myself a bit, as I could now see the world from everybody's point of view, so that even the actions of the worst criminal became more transparent to me. I could never agree with the beliefs, or with the actions of a criminal mind for example, but I could now understand it. When that happened and when I noticed myself understanding with ease how it was possible for people whose acts I detested to do the things they did, I stopped and after that became content with being less forceful when expressing my own views. 

The word Εγώ (Ego) means "I" and "self" in Greek and I was expecting it to be one of the first words that a child would use to describe themselves, since it is such an easy, short word. However, I have noticed that very young children refer to themselves in third person with their names, so that a boy named Harry would say for example "Harry wants some water" before he says "I want some water". Aretousa says a whole story in third person, so that Aretousa did this and that today and so on, and when I try to tell her to say "I did so and so today", she then says "Yes, you did do so and so, but Aretousa did this and that". So the letter Έψιλον (Epsilon) stands for Εγώ in the Greek alphabet letters we are making with Aretousa, although I think we are both still coming to grips with exactly what ourselves stand for.