Do you think we’re shaped more by our experiences or by who we are?
I don’t think it is an either/or question. I am convinced that we are shaped by an interaction between who we are and what happens to us. Karl Ove Knausgaard, observing his children meticulously, would give it all to nature. I may agree, though the right or wrong responses of parents or those around you can be profound. I was sent away to boarding school at age of eight. That can fck with everything.
The older I get, the more I see evidence of both. I can look back through my diaries, written as a teenager in the 1970s, and recognise traits that were already there long before I understood them. Curiosity. Independence. A tendency to observe rather than simply participate. A willful rebellipusbess. An urge to record events, people and places. To be an archivist, in words, drawings and photos. Whether I was paddling a canoe on the River Eden below Appleby Castle, acting as an extra in a Disney film at Alnwick Castle, or trying to make sense of life at boarding prep and then public school, the same person is looking out through those pages.
Yet experience clearly matters too. My parents’ separation, boarding school, friendships, first loves, university, marriage, parenthood, careers that ranged from television production to online education, and more recently swimming coaching and local politics, all have their influence. They didn’t replace who I was; they shaped, challenged and refined it. Neuroscience would describe this as the interaction between our genetic inheritance and the brain’s plasticity. We arrive with predispositions, but experience continually rewires us.
Looking back over fifty years of diaries and blogs I am struck by both continuity and change. The thirteen-year-old who worried about exams, explored castles, read voraciously and wondered how the world worked is still recognisable. But he has been modified by every heartbreak, success or failure, conversation, journey and book and film since then.
Perhaps the best metaphor is a sailing voyage. DNA provides the hull, rigging and basic design of the boat. Experience supplies the weather, tides and destinations. Neither alone determines where we end up. It is the interaction between the vessel and the voyage that creates the person.
So my answer is that we are shaped by both. We are born with certain tendencies, talents and limitations, but our experiences determine how much of that potential is realised, altered or redirected. The fascinating part is that neither process ever really stops. And I still don’t know what I’m looking for or where I’m headed. Maybe I arrived long ago.
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