Thursday, October 23, 2008

Still Waiting



I have always felt there was something I would become. At some, point, I would awake into the life I was meant to live. But days and years have passed and I have not had my great awakening. I have become clearer, smarter, more focused, less self-destructive. But I am not changing the world. I still want to change the world. I still believe in the power of my insight, and my ability to help. I am a good teacher. I am a good thinker, and a good writer. I am empathic.

Within a year, I will be a lawyer. And, if nothing changes, I will be working at a law firm. Not because it is my dream, but because it is where my life is going right now. I have to be patient now. I am still in school. I am still learning. I am still building my skill as a thinker, writer, and advocate.

And I am still waiting for my life to start, even as I understand that this day, these moments are my life. They are all there is.

This time must have my care and focus. Every moment is another opportunity to awake into the life I am supposed to live because my life is the life I am supposed to live. I think this is akin to the weak anthropic principle. I have seen it rendered many ways. I attempt to render it thus: the possible conditions that can lead to the present state are necessarily unique. It's why deduction is possible. I have seen something; therefore, the universe of what could have happened is limited. Imagine, for example, that you see a wilted flower. That wilted flower can only have been produced by a limited set of occurrences, e.g., the life and death of the flower. Moreso, that flower could not be, were you not there to see it.

Just so, I now am. I could not be otherwise. My very existence removes a whole world of possibility from existence. My existence prevents my father from having been killed in Vietnam. That I never have played professional baseball prevents me from having been a professional baseball player. Thus the future affects the past as much as the past affects the future. It is a way of stating an obvious imperative that's easy to overlook.

Related: There is no meaning independent of the listener. There is no reality independent of consciousness.

Perhaps I should not be twisting astro- into metaphysics. But how else to know whether they go together?

photo: (c)2007 Derek Ramsey, grabbed from this page.