I Like Trees

“I believe that what we do next is what matters most, and recognize that every action, inaction, and breath of becoming is a choice. I will not interfere with the choices of others unless they are causing real harm.”

          I had a discussion with someone about whether the world is a current, dragging you on to destinations that you might choose between, but never pull against, or whether it is a bland, currentless ocean in which you can find your own way.

                Predestination versus free will. It never gets old. We’ll be having this debate forever. When I die, people will stand around and wonder whether I wrote so much bad poetry because of my madness, or whether I wrote it in spite of it. And no one will ever know, not really, not even me. All you’ll have is a heap of bad verse and the question of why the hell i wrote it, and that will be my last bad metaphor in awkward terms, my opus, my fabulous and most evocative work. One big stream of writing, that I’ve no further use for and you can’t imagine why it came to be. I say this completely without sarcasm, but with a lot of cackling glee.

                Look… you’re in this world, whether you want it or not. It will never be exactly what you wanted. It will never be what you dreamed. At some point, taking advantage of what’s here requires that you let go of the you-image that you’ve built in your head, and claiming the you that you can build in the world. This is a lot harder for some people, and I understand that. It’s a lot harder for me. You have to become real, and becoming real means accepting that what you’ve got is all you’ve got, and that what you do is up to you. It’s terrible and beautiful and dangerous. And real.

                It doesn’t matter which is true. Either we have no choices, or all we have is choice. It doesn’t matter. It’s probably more likely that each choice limits our further choices, but increases our power to maximise the results of the choice. Think on it this way… As kids, we have tons of choice, but very little result. We can play at astronauts all we want, but it would take twenty years of it to actually become one. Our choices are vast, but not yet influential (except that some of those little steps may start paths which become huge.)

        As adults, we don’t have as many things we could really choose to do (it may, realistically, not be physically possible for me to pass the medical exam to be an astronaut.) But the choices that I do have- the options that are currently workable for me- are spectacularly workable, because I’ve got more of me to apply to them. I have discovered a knack for writing bad poetry. As a child, I could do it, but it wouldn’t be a very clear, crisp, good example of it. As an adult, I can write really bad poetry, and apply all of myself to the work. Out of my limited paths of talents and abilities, I can get a heck of a lot farther in any of those directions than ever before. I can apply myself, and write some of the worst poetry ever written. And I can do it every day, because I have the attention span and the determination (and a vast, even slightly sadistic, indifference to popular opinion.)

                That’s really what happens in a life- the evolution of choices. The more you choose, the more you get out of your choices. What’s more, there is always the option of going back, as an adult, and taking one of the other choices that used to be sub-optimal. I wasn’t ready for school ten years ago, but I can choose to go back to school. It’s a small choice, it doesn’t change much… yet. It will. Eventually that tiny little shift will open many doors, as I continue to choose my way down the path.

                You cannot choose what life gives you. You can try to get it into context; you can change how you deal with it and you can choose what you do with it. Life is both a game of genetic and environmental chance, and the ultimate do-it-yourself kit. You are given a pile of stuff, a pile of predisposition and circumstances, and a wrench. Go to it, kid.

                To put this in a more biological sense, you have a genetic predisposition. That can’t be argued. Some have a predisposition to narcolepsy, for example. (Shout out to my fellow sleepers. Sorry, folks, you’ve got me in your corner.) Some have a predisposition to physical prowess. Some have a little bit of extra mental organisation and become chess geniuses. That’s the lotto that we’re born with.

                What people forget, what everyone forgets, is that genes are not destiny. Not in the long term sense, but not even in the now sense. Genes are turned on and off across your lifetime, and the things you do on a daily basis are what change them. For example, muscle building. You do a heavy workout. Your muscles have cells torn up. They send out a chemical message: get help or there’s trouble.

                Your body uses that message to signal the turn-on for building new cells. Those cells are bigger and stronger, using the alternate pattern contained in your genes. Over time, your body uses these genes over others. The same thing happens in diabetes prevention. You may have the predisposition, but there’s a lot you can do to keep from ever having the disease. You have daily choices, and they control what your body becomes.

                Oddly enough, it seems that even other people’s choices can determine your genes and change how you turn out.

We’ve known for a long time that early experience changes genes; what we know by that (but not how to use it, yet) is that if it can be changed, it can be changed again.

                We’re probably predestined to examine this question for the whole of our lives, but what we make of it, and what we use of it to make ourselves into, remains to be seen. Life is an ocean full of currents, and reefs, and irresistible forces. It is also full of us, and the combination between what we have and what we build is what we are. We are always capable of more, and we are always capable of choice. Sometimes the choices are terrible, but we always contain them. The moment lives in us, and we live in it, and the whole thing moves forward in one big wave, if we’re lucky.

                There is no safe bet in the Nature vs. Nurture debate, (which is only an offshoot of the Free Will and Predestination version) except to say that it will always be both, and that we don’t have full understanding or control over either. I have to come to the conclusion, as in Act 3 of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, by Tom Stoppard: “There must have been a moment, at the beginning, where we could have said—no…” We may never know when it was, but we can’t kick ourselves for not taking it, because that moment is always, always with us. We have always got the choice, no matter where the currents bring us.