Learning | Experience (#5)

5. I Have A Surprising Amount of Faith in Fate

For someone who’s a renowned skeptic, and spent much of his childhood crusading against organized religion and the foolishness of faith, I’m surprisingly superstitious. I routinely argue with myself, and challenge my own beliefs, and consistently come down on the side of logic, which pretty much tells me I’m full of shit.

However, I guess I drink from the same well of human fear and need, because there are so many things I WANT to believe in. In many ways, that’s essentially what I’ve been searching for since I was a child. Something worthy of belief. Something I can hang my hat on, something that’s consistent and true. Something comforting and familiar. Something powerful and all-encompassing.

Even though I don’t believe in God, I’m looking for him in the world around me.

I look everywhere.

Science fiction has long been my favorite genre of entertainment. I’ve often said that I was born in the wrong century, and that I really should have come into existence 500 years from now when humanity was (hopefully) cruising the stars and exploring the limits of the universe. I salivate at the concept of our technological progression, and one of my biggest regrets is that I will never live to see it. I’ll never KNOW.

It’s no wonder that my favorite subject within science fiction is time travel. There’s no surer way to pique my interest, from Time Traveler’s Wife to Minority Report to Journeyman to Quantum Leap to Back to the Future to Replay. My interest has provided an image of time as a continuum that doesn’t necessary begin at the present. For example, I’m living in Washington, right? If someone went back in time to see me at 25, and watched my life unfold, where would I wind up? The same place. Every time.

Is that fate? Predestination? I don’t know.

But you know, I bet 100 times out of 100, if you started my life over on a loop and put me back in the same place I was mentally and emotionally, I’d let my relationship with Nancy slip away, I’d say no to Laura, I’d chase after Janica, I’d lose my friendship with Jeff, I’d hop from Jen to Dana to Linda to Rebecca, I’d squander my education, I’d hook up with Barrett and move to Washington. Etc, etc.

None of us are random enough that we would actually choose differently throughout our lives. It’s only through the wisdom of retrospect that we can, with a more mature and evolved outlook, consider alternate choices, and view our lives with regret.

What we have, however, is chance. What happens if I never happen to stumble online at the one point in time where I meet person X? Timing is everything. If I would make the same choices again and again, the difference is What I Would Encounter to Provoke Those Choices. Because right now, I could leave my apartment and go to the store, and possibly run into a woman with my cart whom I click with immediately, and strike up a conversation and fall in love and have children who would be kings. Whatever my response is, it’s going to be my response if we do it 100 times.

But let’s say I decide to finish this entry first before going to the store, so I never run into that woman, and instead on my way home get into a car accident because it’s icy outside and I think that my car can make it into the parking lot when actually it can’t, and I get plowed into and spend the next year in a coma.

Choice? Same each time. I’m not going to decide I will make it this time, and won’t the next time, then will.

So what is life? A bunch of random events.

That’s why I liked this quote:

House: They’re out there, doctors, lawyers postal workers, some of them doing great, some of them doing lousy. Are you going to base your whole life on who you got stuck in a room with?
Eve: I’m going to base this moment on who I’m stuck in a room with. It’s what life is. It’s a series of rooms and who we get stuck in those rooms with adds up to what our lives are.
House, "One Day, One Room"

For a person who prides himself on self-determination and personal responsibility, the concept of life-as-predetermined-choices is surprising. I think that wisdom lies in the space in between fate and randomness. I think that with tremendous effort, we can evolve ourselves into people who make intelligent choices when these random situations arise. We can change the way we react. That is what learning is; that is what maturity is. It’s the ability to look inside and say, ok, next time I fall for a chick with a fiancé, I’m not getting involved with her romantically, no matter how tempting it is.

Because people who don’t learn? They repeat their mistakes. We’ve seen it. We all know people like that, who are locked into the same choice path again and again, who follow the same cycle until you want to smack them. There are limits, of course. I mean, I’m never going to stop chasing that click, for example, but I no longer ruin my relationships or sacrifice my commitments to do so. I just accept them as a natural facet of human interaction.

I learned.

When I look at where I am in my life, I realize I could not help but be here. Each decision was my fault. Each choice was my responsibility. It’s up to me to better myself for the next time.

It occurs to me that this philosophy is neatly reactive AND proactive. Funny, that.

I often equate my beliefs to Taoism, which is convenient because it has never been a unified religion. Tao can be roughly equated to the flow of the universe, the path and the way of not just our lives, but all lives, the universe itself. Living in concord with The Way, and actively cultivating that harmony with the universe, is what many–including myself–seek to do. Again, both reactive and proactive.

However, I also believe in karma, of the power of lessons learned and unlearned. I believe that good results come from good acts, and that bad results come from bad acts. However, I don’t attribute it to the reinforcement system of a bored deity, but simple common sense, the recognition of the value of positively directing your life.

For example, in my 20’s I made a lot of bad choices, and performed a few bad acts, and as a result, my life was pretty crappy. This is logic. Bad choices and bad acts = bad life. There’s no deity involved there, no unifying force. I consciously took steps to evolve my personality and act out of wisdom. As a result, good choices and good acts = good life.

That’s causality. Beneficial effects from beneficial actions, detrimental effects from detrimental actions. Very rarely will a wise choice cause ruin. That’s kind of the point of it being wisdom.

I’m a logical person, but I believe that you gotta be good to have a good life. And that’s what I’m trying to be.

I’m tryin real hard to be the shepherd.

Thanks, Jules.

Ready to get away from the logic? Ok, let’s do it.

If we’re predisposed toward certain choices, we’re going to eventually wind up in similar situations to ones in our past. In some regard, we’re going to repeat them, until we get them right. If my leisure time is a certain type of activity, and I meet people who have similar activities,then I’m going to develop similar relationships and meet similar people.

There are certain events, and individuals, who are linchpins in our continuum. I can easily point to Laura, for example, and demonstrate (once I finish that damn story, I really need to) how one decision drastically altered the course of my life. It doesn’t have to be a romantic relationship, of course; it could be that teacher you had in grade school, or your uncle who basically raised you because your family was fucked up.

Sometimes I meet people and I know they’re going to be pivotal people in my life. I just know. It’s inevitable. I can feel it within an hour of meeting them, I can sense it, and it’s never been wrong–the only thing that I can never guess right is whether or not it’s pivotal in a good way, or pivotal in a fuck-me-over way. I think my friends believe I’m a little nutty when I say this. Maybe it’s just intuition, maybe I’m just extremely perceptive on a certain level.

Now for the nuttiness.

I’ve always been enamored of déjà vu. I have a fine memory for my dreams, partially because I encourage it. I spend a lot of time focusing on remembering details, occasionally etching scenes into memory, though admittedly it’s a bit harder as I get older (which gives me no small amount of frustration, believe me). Occasionally, I have flash dreams that I’ll remember, and actually think about..and then at some point, I’ll be in exactly that situation, doing exactly that thing, and I’ll be like "wait a sec, I completely remember this," and I know it’s not a false memory, because I actually do remember not only thinking about it, but analyzing it. At times, I’ve even mentioned them to people; I remember mentioning one dream about a certain game (City of Heroes) to Barrett. It didn’t even exist yet, it wasn’t even in "coming soon" mode. Then, two years later, the exact scene that I described occurred, and when it happened, I stopped, and was like "whoa", and I knew what would happen next, and it did, and I’m like, ok, there is absolutely no way that I could actually have accidentally guessed an exact scenario in a game that didn’t exist at the time. The fact that I told her about it really gave me pause, because it threw it out of the realm of complete imagination and fabrication and made it somehow startlingly real.

It doesn’t happen a lot, but it happens. I’ve dubbed them "clarifying moments". I consider it something of a sign from the cosmos, maybe some feedback along my lifeline/continuum. Essentially, it’s the universe telling me I’m where I am supposed to be, that everything’s proceeding as planned, that I’m doing just fine.

I interpret it that way.

Sometimes, I don’t have one for a significant period of time, and I actually feel like I’ve gotten off track somehow. I’m a little anxious, a little squirrelly, and when I finally have a clarifying moment it’s like a giant pressure off my chest. I can breathe again. It’s ok, my life’s on track. Whew.

The last time that happened was when I first sat behind the reference desk in Centralia. I tell people that it felt like home, but that doesn’t represent it well.

It felt Right. It’s where I was supposed to be.

Life is on course.

Hey, Wren, where’d the logic go?

Yeah, I know.

Trust me, it’s there, but you gotta wade through some of the metaphysical to arrive at it. Take my financial situation. On some level, I think that my penury is a direct result of my years of being a househusband, of not contributing to the household, and as a result I won’t be financially stable until I’ve suffered an equal amount of time in return, to make up for it.

Foolish, of course. And I admit it. But I also admit that it lurks in the back of my head, and that there’s a certain sense of logic in it. Because if I had been working at the library that entire time, I’d be two years further in my progression, which means I’d probably be much more financially stable, which means…right. That I AM paying for being unemployed, that it IS the reason I’m in the state I am today.

Causality.

It’s just that while the latter explanation involves logic, the former applies some sort of cosmic meaning to it.

Or, my relationships. I don’t know if you’re familiar with a snake format, but if you write down the significant women in my life, you can wrap them around in chronological order, with Dana as the midpoint. What you find are startling parallels in terms of romantic involvement (or non- as the case may be). According to this theory, now that I’ve met Susan (who equates to Cathy), the person that I become involved with next will match up with Nancy (my first) on the scale, and therefore be my last.

We’ll see.  But man, I hope so, because I’m pretty impatient.

Is it logic? Nah. And I chuckle about it, and even tease myself, but you know..

..once again, on some level, I believe it.

I NEED something to believe in. I spend too much of my time proselytizing. I’m an eternal preacher and advocate. What I’ve found is that when I lack belief, when I lack faith, my world is a very dark place, a forlorn wasteland.

What I cling to is that by being good, I will earn a good life.

That the biggest gift I can give myself is to learn from past mistakes and to proactively affect my future by positioning myself to make wiser choices and react positively to opportunities that arise.

So when I stride purposefully through the room, when my personality is on full blast, when I’m dazzling and charismatic, am I controlling my future? Am I dictating what will happen? No. But I’m affecting it, guiding its path harmoniously, sculpting something beautiful out of the clay of randomness, because I’m choosing to react to situations in a better way.

It’s about time.