096. ...fingertips barely touching the shards as they shatter...
(morning thinking)
Life is ending from the very beginning. Entropy is a single direction of travel and we die slowly over our lifetime. That’s the deal. There's nothing we can do to stop it.
How we treat our lives as they move toward their inevitable end is kind of, to some extent, up to us. Free Will is digression for another morning thinking session.
If each instance of human consciousness were a delicate and precious vase placed precariously on the lip of a table above a hard stone floor, life starts when the table takes a cosmic knock that sets things wobbling. Life, our waking experience of consciousness, is the subsequent fall.
“Vase” works right? I do tend toward thinking of each of us as vessels for consciousness. Each baby/freshly minted vase is placed on the edge of a wobbly table. A coat on a shoogly peg doesn't cut it metaphorically, wouldn't carry the message of fragility. You can pick a coat up, pat it down, dust it off and hang it back up. But the vase drop is one and done.
We recognise instantly that setting it down like this is a foolish way to treat something so precious. Something so wonderful, so fragile and important, shouldn’t perch on the edge of a precipice.
For whatever reason, that's where it is. There is no actual moment of rest though. We start off way out over the tipping point, already teetering. The vase falls. Life is the drop toward dissolution.
We, the non-corporeal us, could look away, or we can stand stock still, staring in horror, or we can leap. Those who choose to leap know there's no chance of making it to the vase in time to stop the inevitable. It will break.
Nonetheless they leap.
By diving headlong forward we risk making a fool of ourselves, drawing attention to ourselves, hurting ourselves. You could ask what the point would be.
Stand still and watch the fall from a distance or turn away and ignore the plummet. Same result in the end. Leaping, seeing the precious vase in ever greater detail as we stretch out across the intervening space to be present, fingertips barely touching the shards as they shatter and break apart up close doesn't change the outcome. But it wildly alters the experience.
Our life will be vastly different if we stand passively by and watch events unfold. Diving might be scary but that element of autonomy breaks the agentic hold of the immutable forces that pull the vase to the floor. Leaping headlong into it gives us a sense of ownership and participation. We become sovereign.
Plus, for a little while at least, we're flying.
Thanks pals. I think at some point I will slide into trying to describe how I feel about the jumbo question of Free Will, personal choice in a deterministic universe. That could be fun right?
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Jeeez, this is all brilliant. I especially like, "Something so wonderful, so fragile and important, shouldn’t perch on the edge of a precipice."
“Your jaiket’s oan a shooglie peg” means you risk being fired from your job.