It’s not just me, or you. Joseph in Genesis, Pip in Great Expectations, Jane in Jane Eyre, Hamlet in Hamlet, Jack in All the King’s Men, Jed in A Place to Come to, perhaps even Precious in The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency–all are pinballs negotiating obstacles and bouncing off zingers and charged interactions that craft destiny and possibility.
The certain constancy of reckoning with forces beyond individual control shapes life into paragraphs and chapters and sometimes even books. Within that reckoning are dreams and visions, dreams built upon the clues of the past, visions built of emergent goals shaped by all that has come before and, we hope, all effected beyond.
In a culture proclaiming the virtues of pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps and being self made in the image of the divine, living our own visions is considered the high road. In reality, though, the high road is constantly molded by the befuddled muddling of endless variability surrounding our every decision.
Which keeps things interesting.
2 Comments
Anonymous
I am intrigued by the notion that my high road is the accidental by-product of a “befuddled muddling of endless variability.” But the very idea that I or you or Pip are pinballs, while not technically incorrect, seems unsatisfactory, and prompts me to conceptualize personal identity as more of a mystical stew of circumstances and intentionality, and less as an ego separate from the rest of reality, hanging from a single point in space.
current typist
Well said.