Everything we think, say and do says something about us, doesn’t it? There’s nothing unintentional about any of our actions, words or choices. To state otherwise admits to the possibility of randomness, and if the universe or any aspect of it was random, there could be no conscious intention, and therefore no reason to anything. Meaning either is or it isn’t. Meaning is an all-or-nothing proposition for us. That is why we’re condemned to find meaning, to impose order on the world with our thoughts, and to try to make sense of suffering.
It’s possible, of course, that it is all random, and that randomness generated everything. But if that is so, then there’s really not much to say about it, is there? If it’s all determined by the Indeterminacy Principle, then you might as well stop reading right now. It’s all just noise.
I choose to believe in the power of conscious intention in all moments, in the midst of all events, and in the dynamic of each and every relationship, from that which I have with a fly in my car to that which I have with my own mother. To believe that everything has meaning gives me more options than does mindless randomness or probability, under the influence of which I have no real options, even if I have taken (and passed) statistics in college.
Every moment contains its message, even a wisp of water vapor peeling off the tarmac at sunrise as I gather it in through the window of my airplane. We even communicate when we buy groceries. The stuff we buy says something about us. Next time you finish up at the checkout line, take a look in your shopping cart. Ask yourself how you feel based on what you bought, and what it says to you, about you.
Yet nowhere does this meaning accrue more than it does in our inventory about how we spend our time. Time is an amazing and undeviating ally. Time forces me to choose my heart’s desire and dedicate myself to it, since I possess only a limited amount of time. Time forces me to opt in, or to opt out, and to commit. Comes a time in everyone’s life when that person has to grieve the lives he or she chose not to live. For most of us, that’s in middle age, when we go out and buy the Harley.
Looking around my office one day, the room in my little townhouse that has the most ‘me’ crammed between its walls of bookcases and art, I realized that the office was, as much as my larger life was, a perfect and complete reflection of the choices I’d made up to that moment in time. I opt for all that I possess. Just as important, I decide not to possess that which I do not own.
My eyes brushed over the desktop photos that were about other people’s children and not my own. The eyes took in the stack of poems about solitude with nature instead of communion with people in the great city in which I lived. Like moths, my eyes fluttered over to the dusty books about science instead of fiction. Even the wattage I just screwed into the lamp that gave me subdued amber instead of bright fluorescence, even that said something about me. It colored the world I’d made. I chose everything that seemed to happen and everything that didn’t seem to.
In this limited world marked by beginnings and endings in time and in space, every choice for something is a negation of all competing alternatives. And when I try to obviate the grief over all the lives I’ve chosen not to live by choosing all alternatives, I end up choosing nothing. Everything I’d written up to this moment of my life was a choice not to write something else. These dust-coated shelves and the west window through which a thousand dusks had become night, these were my life. They were my choices, down to the last index card plastered with a quote push pinned to my corkboard. I could cast these decisions upon no one else, could blame no Supreme Entity, no world. I had made the world. This is the whole truth.
So much of life is coming to peace with what is chosen. Serenity comes with the acknowledgement that I choose it all.
© 2022 by Michael C. Just
Mike’s novel, The Dirt: The Journey of a Mystic Cowboy, is available in softcover or eBook formats through Amazon.
You can purchase the book through this website. Or go straight to amazon at https://www.amazon.com/s?k=the+dirt+journey+of+a+mystic+cowboy&crid=1S40Q4BXSUWJ6&sprefix=the+dirt%3A+journey+of+a+m%2Caps%2C180&ref=nb_sb_ss_i_1_23
Mike’s other titles, including The Crippy, The Mind Altar, and Canyon Calls, are available through this website or through Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B002
Four of his short stories have recently been published online:
Lies, Ltd. has been published by The Mystery Tribune @ Lies, Ltd.: Literary Short Fiction by Michael C. Just (mysterytribune.com)
The Obligate Carnivore has been published by the Scarlet Leaf Review @ Category: MICHAEL JUST – SCARLET LEAF REVIEW
I See You, Too has been published by the 96th of October @ I See You, Too – 96th of October
Offload, a short story about a man who can heal any disease, is now live and can be read at The Worlds Within at Offload – The Worlds Within