I Am Db

 

At some point in most human lives, each individual begins to wonder who they are. We have been given names and the names often have meanings of their own. We sometimes know about our family’s history and we often place some emphasis on that. You’ll read about people who were able to trace their ancestry back to a king or even a criminal.

In America, if your last name happens to be Presley, you are inevitably going to be asked, “Are you a relative?”

If you live in Liverpool and drive a cab, but your last name is McCartney, your passengers are going to want to know.

Mike McGrear, however, is another story.

What did Sir Paul have that his brother did not have? A different role.

If you could ask Brian Epstein, he would have said that.

I am sure Mike McGrear had talent. He finally dropped his stage-identity and reassumed his family name. Nowadays, Mike McCartney is getting old, just like his brother; only without the entire world knowing everything about him.

So allow me to digress:

Is Sir Paul McCartney more of an I Am than His brother Mike?

Truthfully, if you did not know of either one of them, they might tell you they were “I Am” before they told you who they identified as. One might say, “I am Paul” and the other, “I am Mike.”

“For while one sayeth, I am Paul; and another, I am Mike; are ye not carnal?” ~ (A comedic take on I Corinthians 3:4)

“But who say ye that I am?” Matthew 16:15 KJV

I sometimes read this in a dyslexic way, so as to make the question more philosophical. To rearrange the question only slightly, it could read, “When you begin with ‘I am’, how would you finish that sentence?”

As humans, we need the label to identify the role being played. Even in speech, we all begin with “I Am”. For the sake of research, we could think of it as a mystical version of IMDb. The one we are more familiar with is an online database of information about all kinds of roles being played, the plots, the stories, the summaries, reviews and so on. The mystical counterpart would be the “I Am Db.”

It has never been labeled as such, but it has been around longer than any other database. We often just refer to it as history, but if there were an online database where all of the stories, plots and actors were kept as information, every detail at the end of every sentence that ever began with “I Am” could be better understood.

Your story would be there. Who is the star? “I Am”, as always. “I Am” plays every leading character in every story ever told. On the “I Am Db” page, summarizing your entire life, there would be a synopsis, giving an overview of your story, where it was set, the various roles supporting your character, the environment of the story, the background, props and other fine details. It isn’t a stretch to imagine this database. It is literally “The Book of Life”. Your character knows all you need to know as your character. If called upon to step out of character to talk about the character, you can simply begin by saying, “I Am _________.”

In that blank, just go ahead and put the name you go by. But in order to remember who you really are, think of the character the way all of the other characters would see the character. It is always a role being portrayed by The One I Am.