Moments Pt. 4
My successes may excite me, my failures may trip me up, even later motivate me, but what screws with my mind the most is the consequences of each result, of what happens afterwards. If I didn’t succeed at this I wouldn’t have met you, or I wouldn’t have found this or that opportunity if I hadn’t failed at this one. It makes me question my own beliefs about why things transpire the way they do. Not to take away from responsibility… I’ve always been a big believer and practitioner of taking responsibility for your actions – in some cases to an extreme, where the situation was literally out of my hands. ‘Cause I rather relay it to myself than play a victim, become powerless, and have a powerless mindset. But a compilation of strange moments has diversified my thinking.
I don’t believe in coincidences… I think that what we perceive as ‘coincidences’ are called coincidences because we’re too small to see the bigger picture, the machinations of the universe. It’s like trying to explain a smart phone to an ant. Everything is connected. Every time I experience something that seems to illustrate this it doesn’t cease to surprise me. It surprises me how one thing can affect everything else down the road, like dominoes, like butterflies. How everything you touch is not in your hands, how everything that you know, that you don’t know, that you don’t know that you don’t know, are not necessarily within your reach. This may seem obvious, especially the latter, but I guess it always bothered my sense of being able to fully control the process of my life. Does this leave space for fate? The absence of will, is it simply a mirage? Or is it an ever interchanging weave of personal sovereignty and the world that surrounds you? I think of it like a tree, at first it is just seed, it has certain genetics and therefore certain predispositions to specific environments. As it grows taller and taller it branches out, and as time goes on it becomes harder and harder to go back and grow new branches from the trunk instead of sticking with the older ones. Similarly our fate lies in our genetics and the environment we’re tossed into. The ability to change your fate lies in your hands, the actions you choose, the people you choose to surround yourself with, and the environment that you strive towards. Essentially, your fate lies in your reactions to what life gifts you, to what life throws at you. As time moves forward it becomes harder to change these aspects and therefore your fate.
I am constantly fascinated by the smallest actions. How they may snowball into such huge consequences, unforeseen results, for good or bad (or is the good and bad of the results for us to decide?). I realize that I am leaving you, the reader, with many questions to think about, and not many concrete answers to satisfy your curiosity. It can be perceived as frustrating, and philosophical questions mostly are - but I guess I just revel in it, in how the world can be so chaotic, yet ordered at the same time. The only conciliation I have is having the strength to be able to focus on what I can change, the patience to deal with what I can’t, and the wisdom to know the difference between the two.
“O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done…”
