There are a constellation of illusions or myths that we as a species are nearly unable to resist, present company included! We are virtually unable to see past some of these seeming “certainties”. One of which is the illusion of straight lines. We like to think that we are here now and at a distance “X” at some point in the future (either literally or figuratively) and after another similar interval of time we will be another “X” away from this point. But it seldom works that way. We could be 100X away or exactly in the same place, other times we might disappear entirely!
Life really is not linear. There are some conceptually simple reasons for this. First, where is here anyway? And what about now (and when is now, or maybe how soon is now?) Life is fuzzy. Life is dynamic. Life is one giant interconnect probability cloud of sandwiches, sunburns, and simpletons.
And of course, life is all perfectly-ish interconnected. Everything is connected to everything else in an infinite number of ways, like a giant cosmic neural network.
It is part geometric and at other times/places/flavors exponential or even “stop-go”. There are regions that are governed by huge activation energies. There will be a handful really great days and a handful of awful ones, and tens of thousands that blend together. Graduations and car accidents and near graduations and near car accidents in a sea of mind-numbingly many-more episode sevens of some third season of a forgettable sit-com. Just as Newtonian physics is really just a special case of PHYSICS and yet we virtually never experience anything other than Newtonian physics, all of life is really much much more interconnected with complicated cross-products than we realize. This frees us. We can act as if we can act rude to a store clerk and the ripples of that action stop right there in that room in that moment. But we know that we are actually affecting future crop yields and the birth and death of distant stars. The corollary to this is equally true, we should not be surprised when seemingly unrelated things seem to be connected magically through space and or time, because everything is!
If you are not yet where you want to be, maybe only say 10% of the way there after years and years of studious diligence, despair not! You could be “there” next week. I for one can attest to the fact that I feel I have made as much progress in understanding myself in the past year as I had in the previous ten and that the previous ten was more than the nearly four decades that preceded that! It gives me real hope and optimism. It really helps offset all the Covid-19 and congressional dysfunction that seems painfully eternal and ubiquitous.
Walk the path. It is about movement, about journey, about daring webs of connection. If you are not where you want or think you want to be that is perfectly okay. Though, if you ARE where you want to be keep moving as well. The universe may rest but it does not stop. It may even play dice!
