Personality

Personality - originally taken from the Greek term for the mask worn by actor, the modern word derives from the Latin “persona”, meaning the image a peron presents in public, as opposed to their true self.

If you randomly approach someone on the streets of London, New York or any other metropolitan location and ask them what they picture in their mind’s eye to the prompt “Arizona”, I think it is a sure bet that the answer will be the Saguaro cactus. And not just any old saguaro, but the cartoonish, often smiling and somewhat alien looking two armed character. Maybe not surprising, considering that saguaros live almost exclusively in the Sonoran Desert, for which the US portion just happens to lie almost entirely in Arizona (bonus obvious fact - the larger portion of the Sonoran Desert lies in the State of Sonora, Mexico). Within those confines, there are estimated to be over two million specimens, a number that has doubled since 1990. So, if you hike out into the desert, just like walking down Main Street in your hometown, you will likely see people (or rather saguaros) and lots of them, pretty much everywhere.

Spend some time mingling with people (or rather saguaros) and you cannot ignore the universal diversity in size, age, weight and appearance, that is unique and conspicuous across every individual. Unfortunately, to cope with the onslaught of information our senses take in walking down a city street, we often deploy “thin-slicing”, a practice resulting in us making assumptions about another person’s personality, apparently in as little as a tenth of a second. Sounds like a recipe for jumping to faulty first impressions, stereotyping, and, taken to a twisted, logical conclusion, dead ending in tribalim and discrimination. Are we likely to be processing anything differently, if you move the context to the desert and we are trying to make sense of the multitude of saguaros across the landscape?

I think that in this time of ideological and political extremism, where initially well intentioned concepts like “DEI” and “woke” can be convoluted and weaponized to serve a particular group’s agenda, we may take a lesson from how we observe saguaros. As you start to notice differences in the physical appearence and distribution of saguaros across the desert landscape, I start to wonder if it is all just a fluke of the environment and the terrain, or do the saguaros themselves have a say in it? Researchers have already established that saguaros, like trees in northern forests, respond to a variety of stimuli from both friend and foe and communicate in meaningful and individual ways with their friends and relatives. From here, I think it is just a very small leap to imagining that saguaros are, at least on some level, imbued with personality. Just like us humans. Then, by extension, do we segregate our evaluation of saguaro personalities into the same kind the mental boxes we project onto humans - happy, sad, sick, healthy, young, old, agressive, passive, good, bad?

If you travel this thorny path and conclude there is no reason why saguaros cannot have personalities, then I think the take away is obvious and uncontestable. If saguaros indeed have individual personalities, then how we “thin-slice” our reactions to them is just an artifice and figment of our imaginations, whether for good or for bad. It is not an outfacing projection of the personality or reality by the individual, as intended by the definition of personality. In the end of course, saguaros are just plants, creatures which happen to not speak our language. Maybe that is where we should leave matters - saguaros are who they are, not what we imagine them to be. It does not have to be any different in our interactions with other individuals we share the planet with, as woke as that might sound.

In the Personality gallery, I’ve included images both of saguaros in the context of their environment and with their surroundings stripped away. I think considering both versions of these saguaro protraits is a useful exercise in reflecting on personality and how we respond. And not just out in the desert, in the company of saguaros.