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Chance and Choice

I finished reading a lovely novel, The Midnight Library by Matt Haig, and this week several similar thematic writings have come across my desk.

The GoodReads synopsis tells us what happens in the Midnight Library:

Between life and death there is a library, and within that library, the shelves go on forever. Every book provides a chance to try another life you could have lived. To see how things would be if you had made other choices . . . Would you have done anything different, if you had the chance to undo your regrets?”…

Somewhere out beyond the edge of the universe there is a library that contains an infinite number of books, each one the story of another reality. One tells the story of your life as it is, along with another book for the other life you could have lived if you had made a different choice at any point in your life. While we all wonder how our lives might have been, what if you had the chance to go to the library and see for yourself? Would any of these other lives truly be better?1

And this comes into view from one of my favorite newsletters, BrainPickings:

To be alive is to marvel — at least occasionally, at least with glimmers of some deep intuitive wonderment — at the Rube Goldberg machine of chance and choice that makes us who we are as we half-stride, half-stumble down the improbable paths that lead us back to ourselves. My own life was shaped by one largely impulsive choice at age thirteen, and most of us can identify points at which we could’ve pivoted into a wholly different direction — to move across the continent or build a home here, to leave the tempestuous lover or to stay, to wait for another promotion or quit the corporate day job and make art. Even the seemingly trivial choices can butterfly enormous ripples of which we may remain wholly unwitting — we’ll never know the exact misfortunes we’ve avoided by going down this street and not that, nor the exact magnitude of our unbidden graces.

Perhaps our most acute awareness of the lacuna between the one life we do have and all the lives we could have had comes in the grips of our fear of missing out — those sudden and disorienting illuminations in which we recognize that parallel possibilities exists alongside our present choices. “Our lived lives might become a protracted mourning for, or an endless tantrum about, the lives we were unable to live,” wrote the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips in his elegant case for the value of our unlived lives. “But the exemptions we suffer, whether forced or chosen, make us who we are.”2

What do we do at crossroads? Do we leave it to chance or make a choice? Either way, we are leaving one path for another.

The place I am at now tells me that my choices need to be made looking out and not down. I think I would like to be a good ancestor:

  1. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52578297-the-midnight-library
  2. https://www.brainpickings.org/2017/01/06/simone-de-beauvoir-all-said-and-done-chance-choice/
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Avert Climate Disaster?

I recently finished Bill Gates new book, How To Avoid A Climate Disaster. It was full of thoughtful insights with up-to-date numbers and charts. Bill Gates filled his time in 2020 researching and writing this book. It is a treatise designed to get us into action. He wants to compel us to do something, not waiting for the other guy to get things going. Be an early adopter.

I agree with it all: we need to choose zero carbon alternatives; we need to be aware of corporate practices and let them know with your wallets what we will and won’t accept.

The book, though, seems to be written for Americans when Americans are making bad climate action decisions: leaving the Paris Agreement, gutting the Environment Protection Agency. Gates makes his strongest case for taking action politically with votes and advocacy. It all makes good sense, even if you are not American. We are not moving the needle fast enough. We need policies to force change. Yes, governments can help us decide which lane we are driving in. I think, though, in addition to a top-down approach–laws, regulations, and a push for more innovative research and development, we need grassroots actions. It is not a footnote to decide to energy conservation in your home or walk to the store instead of driving. We need to ensure that ecologically sustainable options are at the forefront of our decisions. Each step is one step closer and each conversation helps keep this crisis on the front page.

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Pondering Eco thoughts

In my reading this week, these two thoughts have been rattling around in my head. I am wondering how they are connected, if they are and where will they take me.

Joseph Campbell in Pathways to Bliss, Mythology and Personal Transformation says

There lives in us, says Durchheim, a life wisdom. We are all manifestations of a mystic power: the power of life, which has shaped all life, and which has shaped up all in our mother’s womb. And this kind of wisdom lives in us, and it represented the force of this power, this energy, pouring into the field of time and space. But it’s a transcendent energy. It’s an energy that comes from a realm beyond our powers of knowledge.

In Ecopsychology: Eight Principles, Theodore Roszak says

If ecopsychology has anything to add to the Socratic-Freudian project of self-knowledge, it is to remind us of what our ancestors took to be common knowledge: there is more to know about the self, or rather more self to know, than our personal history reveals. Making a personality, the task that Jung called “individuation,” may be the adventure of a lifetime. But every person’s lifetime is anchored within a greater universal lifetime…the needs of the planet are the needs of the person, the rights of the person are the rights of the planet.

I feel like these are both saying the same thing. What is present in the seed to create a tree, or a human is the energy of the universe. How can I use this without feeling very small and insignificant?

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Re-Reading Voluntary Simplicity

As I sorted through the books on my too-full shelves, I discovered a very yellowed, stiff book, Voluntary Simplicity. It cracked as I opened it to the first chapter.

I was going through my books to see which ones contained old information that new research invalidates. Those would go in the recycle pile. With all the research on climate change, environmental hazards and the destructive nature of the consumerist culture, this book seemed like old news.

Then I read the first paragraph:

The world is profoundly changing, that much seems clear. We have entered a time of great uncertainty that extends from local to global scale. We are forced by pressing circumstances to ask difficult questions about the way we live our lives: Will my present way of life still be workable when my children go up? How might their lives, and my own, be different? Am I satisfied with my work? Does my work contribute to the well-being of others–or is it just a source of income? How much income do I really require? Require for what? How much of my consumption adds to the clutter and complexity of my life rather than to my satisfaction? How does my level and pattern of consumption affect other people and the environment? …. Am I missing much of the richness of life by being preoccupied with the search for social status and consumer goods? What is my purpose in life? How am I to take charge of my life?1

It feels like the more things change, the more things stay the same. We have advanced so far in so many ways yet we are still asking the same questions about how we live in the world, perhaps even more urgently.

I could see this stall as a sign that hope for a better future is a pipe dream. Or I could see this as, at least, we are still asking. When we keep the questions in our mind, the answers can be found.

Today, I choose the later.

silhouette of mountains
Photo by Simon Berger on Pexels.com
  1. Elgin, Duane. Voluntary Simplicity: An Ecological Lifestyle that Promotes Persona & Social Renewal. Bantam Book, 1981. Page 1.