I have often thought of how a person's name might influence their life. From the basic
assumptions people make about you, to the unpredictable little daily quirks, to the shaping
of one's own self-image... a name, YOUR name, has a more powerful influence on your
life than I think most people consider to be the case.
My name is Aaron. It is a name of Hebrew, or possibly of unknown Egyptian, origin. It has several meanings associated with it: exalted, strong, high mountain, mountain of strength, enlightened, lofty, enlightment in love, GR the moss under the lightning (ha... I have no idea what that means), to sing, and so on. There are many variant forms of the name: Aaran, Aaren, Aarin, Aaro, Aaronas, Aaronn, Aarron, Aaryn, Aeron, Aeryn, Aharon, Ahran, Ahren, Ahron, Airen, Airyn, Aran, Arand, Arek, Aren, Arend, Ari, Arin, Arnie, Aron, Aronne, Arran, Arron, Arun, Auron, Ayren, Ayron, Erin, Haroun, Ron, Ronnie and Ronny. What does any of this mean? How does knowing any of this have an effect on me? Well I do find it interesting either way. I didn't know most of this before today so obviously it has not done much in the way of influencing me in general.
The semi-uncommon use of the name has had an effect on me in some ways. Growing up I happened to go to school with three or four other Aarons in my own grade at any given time so I did not think it was a particularly uncommon name. I was often reminded of how uncommon, or even weird, I might be as a person growing up and I typically saw that to be true of the other Aarons I knew. Somehow it made sense to me in that way. We were a different sort of breed I thought. Like somehow the name had some bearing on that... or did it?
I always thought it was cool that I was the second word in the dictionary after aardvark, that I was always first in line when we had to line up in order of first name in school, that "Air Head" was pretty much the only nickname people generally came up with, and that I shared a name with somebody in the Bible who was kind of important. Whenever I played video games and had to enter my initials for a high score or whatever I liked that I never had to change the first letter from the default letter "A" before doing the rest of my letters. I always thought it was strange that it was also a girl name, even if spelled differently, and that if you spelled my name backwards it was basically a girl name too.
One of the unpredictable daily quirks I have found is that, often being the first person in a friend's contact list on their cell phone, I often get what I have come to term as the "pocket call." I have dubbed it that since it usually seems that what I hear on the other end of the line is the background noise of life and I am now a small technological passenger in that unsuspecting friends pocket, listening to the car radio, having a casual conversation with somebody else, or just walking through a busy thoroughfare... or wherever they are. I get these calls anywhere from once a month to several times in a few minutes. These phone calls usually come from people I have not recently talked to or are not expecting a call from. I have found it to be an entertaining little diversion. And I doubt anybody named Zack will be privy to such similar little events of a basically trivial nature.
Who are you? Have you taken your own name as a part of your identity? Has it changed your perspective of who you would like to be or plan to become? I know my name has done all this to me. Maybe I'm just one of the luckier ones... named Aaron.
