INFLUENCE

A week or so ago, a friend of mine was filling out a personality questionnaire (yeah, for an online matchmaking service). We were chatting by instant messaging at the same time, so we were nit-picking, snarking and considering some of the various questions (we like to joke with each other). But she hit one question that made her pause for a bit. And I had to stop and think about it as well.

The question went something like this: After your parents, who is the person who has had the most influence on your life?

It’s a good question.

Now, I’m a Christian. So the easy, quick, simple answer to that question would be “Jesus.” And it would be true. But it also doesn’t go very far into explaining the rest of my personality and how that was influenced and shaped. So I looked beyond that level.

And looked. And thought.

There have been many people in my life that I have admired greatly and have striven to emulate in some fashion. There are many people that I’ve learned important things from. There have been many people whom I just love as friends and so have taken aspects of them into myself. And yet, for all that, I couldn’t settle on one person who had had a powerful effect on the shaping of my personality and/or outlook.

Until I started thinking “outside the box.”

Because what I discovered was that the “person” who had the greatest influence (after my parents and the Lord) in shaping my personality wasn’t a real person at all, but rather a fictional one.

Sherlock Holmes.

Now, I may have heard the name “Sherlock Holmes” when I was very young, but I don’t think it meant anything to me. However, when I was in fourth grade (and at the advanced age of ten), on a chance, I made a mostly unsupervised excursion into a book store. And there I made what I think was one of my first independently chosen purchases of a book. I bought a paperback copy of His Last Bow by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

At the time, I didn’t know that it was the last collection of stories about Holmes. All I knew at the time was that the stories and the character fascinated me. In a relatively short time after that (during the next year, I think), I worked my way through the whole canon of stories.

I was always a pretty literal child, very straightforward in many ways. So the discovery of this character who reveled in exercising his Powers of Observation, who would rationally and logically evaluate things without the color of an emotional context, this excited me. I wanted so much to be able to see the details that Sherlock could see, and to make the logical conclusions from those details that he could make. So much so, that a summer or so later, my “summer fun project” was to set up a consulting detective agency. Alas, eleven and twelve year olds on summer vacation don’t have much need of consulting detectives.

But aside from that unfulfilled recreation, the “magic” of Sherlock Holmes worked its way into my thinking. Since I was already inclined to approach things in a similar fashion to Holmes, his little lectures on his solutions or observations were like seeds falling into very fertile soil.

On the one hand, Holmes taught me not to make assumptions too quickly about things I saw or heard. But with that was paired the awareness that combining specific little details together could create a contextual picture. But even with that was the warning that the contextual picture might still be incomplete. So, Holmes also taught me to be prepared to re-evaluate my understanding of things that had gone before.

Now, I’m not claiming that I consciously understood these points as I was reading, understanding that I was learning them and making them part of myself. No. That awareness came several years later. What I did understand at that point was that I had found something that challenged my mind in a way that nothing else I’d encountered up till then had done. That was exciting. And the foreign-to-me world of Victorian England was intriguing to visit, time and again. (I’m a great re-reader.)

Beyond the training of the rational mind, I found in the stories of Sherlock Holmes a character who was passionate about justice, who in spite of his apparent disdain for emotion and relationship involvements was incredibly loyal to his friend (who returned that loyalty), who frequently displayed mercy toward people who had gone astray but wished to repent, and who was not above playful intellectual mischief. I understood Sherlock Holmes.

So, after considering all these things, I have no qualms about claiming that the “person” after my parents and the Lord who has had the most thorough influence on me is Sherlock Holmes. For good or ill. But I prefer to think it was for good.

LOOKING BACKWARD

I recently had the opportunity to visit the town where I was born and spent my first 16 years of life.

It was interesting to go there, with my older sister. We drove round the town, past the house we grew up in, by the High School, past the Junior High I attended, through a couple of parks that were very crucial in my young life.

The streets were narrower than I remembered, distances between things were shorter than I remembered. Yes, there were plenty of changes (it’s been quite a while, after all, since I last saw the place). At one point my brother-in-law was concerned that we were getting lost (driving between the two parks). But, I actually remembered the route, and that it did have to go seemingly out of the way. I found it funny, that after all that time, the pattern was still imprinted in the recesses of my brain.

I got great satisfaction visiting the second park, one of my favorite places in town when I was growing up. And it is still kept up well and worthy of that long-standing affection.

I suppose some people revisit their hometowns when they are seeking to reconnect with their roots, trying to remember things about their core natures that have gotten distracted by life’s events. But this was not part of my little odyssey.

I have what I like to call a “highly retentive memory”. So part of the visit was just a confirmation that memory had not been eroded. Things like the little hollow dip at the end of a hill slope where we frequently went sledding. Yup, the hollow was still there. When sledding, you had to hit it just right, or you’d end up biting your lip from the bounce. So it was nice to find that the world I knew as a child remains pretty much as it was.

I don’t spend a lot of time “looking backward” on my life. I don’t dwell in the past that much, wishing things were as they were “back when”. I remember the events and places and people of my life, in a way that keeps them fresh in my mind. But I have no particular desire to go back and be there again.

Everything that happens to us, changes us in little ways. Or big ways. But mostly little ways.

Now, although many of the events of my childhood were very important in making me the person I am today, I wouldn’t want to go back to being that person that I was then. To sacrifice all that I have picked up since then (both the good and the bad)? No. I remember with pleasure the delight I had in whizzing down that hill in the park on a sled, the wintry air crisp in my lungs. And yes, perhaps I do need to recapture a bit of that spontaneous delight. I plan things a bit too much these days.

It’s just that most of the time, when I hear people talking about looking back on their lives, they seem to be doing it with a sense that they lost something somewhere back there. That they made a wrong choice about something, and if only they could retrieve the choice, their “now” would be much better. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that I’ve made all the right choices in my life. Good heavens, no. And some things, I didn’t have any choice about: like when we moved from Michigan to Texas when I was 16. To me, the looking back is important for acknowledging the moments that made me who I am now.

Because, for the most part, I would rather be who I am now than anyone else. The bad things along with the good. Accepting that I have a temper was important. I don’t get mad very often these days, but I do have a rather strong temper when it is aroused, and admitting that, knowing that, helps me deal with it when it does get triggered. I had to go through some tough things to get to that point. Would I want to do without them? No. The (for want of a better word) unfortunate events of my life have exposed my darker side to myself in ways I could not ignore. There is no value in pretending they did not happen, because they did. But they changed me. Contributed to who I am now.

So I think for me, the journey to the childhood home was more than nostalgia. Perhaps it was a celebration of the ground where God set me on the path of my life. A thanksgiving for such a good place for a beginning. I know what I had was something not everyone is blessed with. And it was refreshing to find that my memory of it was not mistakenly colored with a rosy filter. It’s a smallish city, it has its economic problems and always did. But I think I needed to see it in the here-and-now, as it is. It is not a small town fantasy like Main Street of Disneyland. It’s a Michigan town that’s gone through changes since it was founded, but still continues to be home to plenty of people. It’s where I began, and the places and people of it have left their imprint on me.

And this is the sort of looking back that we should all do from time to time. To remember where we came from, accept it for what it was and what it gave to us (good and bad). And then to continue on the path that God has laid out for us.