wherever you go, there you are... or are you?

I've been thinking a lot lately about change. I am not who I was ten years ago. Nor am I who I was last year, or last month, or even yesterday. Everyone evolves - friends, family members, acquaintances, people we aren't terribly fond of. It's a fact of life, but it isn't one that we tend to focus a whole lot of energy on. We all care deeply about some people and hold grudges against others without regard for the amount of time that has passed since our feelings arose. But why? Mentally speaking, they have changed. Physically speaking, they don't even possess the same body they did so many days or months or years ago. When you really think about it, such a continuity problem becomes a complicated issue in terms of both love and accountability.

A few weeks ago, a good friend of mine recommended that I read Milan Kundera's short novel Identity. In it, Kundera tells the story of Jean-Marc, a young Frenchman who becomes consumed by the fear that time will change his lover Chantal into a woman he no longer recognizes. And why shouldn't he? In a world where such change often happens imperceptibly, is it even reasonable to believe that two people can spend 10 or 20 or 50 years together without growing apart or eventually encountering some kind of insurmountable obstacle?

In one of my college courses, we conducted the following thought experiment: a ship goes off on a long voyage. While at sea, boards crack, pipes break, and one by one each component is replaced with a new part. When the ship finally returns, every piece of it is brand new. So is it still the same ship? What if, instead of discarding the old parts, each was gradually assembled into a second ship? Both ships return to port - now, which is the one that left? Personally, I'm inclined to assign identity based on some form of continuous memory; that is, the ship with all the new parts is the one that originally left.

But what about in criminal cases? Yesterday, the New York Times published an interesting article arguing in favor of lessening the punishments for juvenile murderers. The author cites factors such as peer pressure, impulsivity and immaturity as reasons to prohibit severe sentences in juveniles. When it comes to accountability, identity becomes a sticky issue. Releasing a 25-year old murderer is still releasing a murderer, even if he was only 14 when he committed the crime. But at the same time, so much of our growth as human beings occurs during our adolescent years. Is it fair, then, to lock him up for the rest of his life based on a crime he committed when he was barely old enough to know what it meant? I don't think so.

Then again, where do you draw the line? If a young girl kills someone the day before her 15th birthday, should her sentence be any more lenient than that of the young man who commits murder the day after his? What about a 17 year old vs. an 18 year old? I suspect that it's less about age than maturity in these cases, but it is extremely difficult to quantify maturity and even moreso to diagram the grand ways in which an individual has changed since the fateful day that shaped the rest of his or her life.

The famed Greek philosopher Heraclitus once claimed, "change is the only constant"; still, it would seem that our society makes very few provisions for evolution. So how do you make sense of your own continuity of experience? How do you pass fair judgement on the people in your life? What do you place your faith in? I have no idea, but I think it's all worth a thought or two.