(Pandemic Diary - day 197)

From my journal: 11 September 2020 (Friday)

So 19 years ago I was at home in our Toftrees townhouse, living a life that was on a different track than the track it took in response to the events of that day.

Is that true?

I’m not sure I believe there is any opportunity for different tracks. I was already on the track, the only track I could take, when the events of 9/11/01 happened, and my path from that day forward was already established by the events that preceded it. Options are an illusion of the present — in retrospect there was one, and only one, path that could possibly get you to your current situation and condition.

I’ve never drawn a maze, but the technique must be that you draw the way through, the solution, first, and then you fill in all the decoy branches around the real path. And to solve a puzzle like that, I tend to start at the end and work backward, because it eliminates the options. The path is clear when you look backwards.

Of course that’s a huge oversimplification, aimed at explaining or illustrating just this one conclusion, and there are other conclusions. It’s quite possible to draw a maze that has more than one pathway to the end. And you could draw one that has many different ends, and interlinks between pathways such that you could determine the end you move towards partway into the puzzle.

And while it is true that there was only one way to get to the place and condition and situation you’re at in life at any moment, it doesn’t automatically follow that this is where you’re “supposed” to be, or that there is any plan or destiny to it, or that you couldn’t at any point along the way have made some large or tiny deviation that would have taken you to a completely different place.

It might be, or it might not be, and the fact that you are only capable of a single path, and thus have only traveled a single path, says nothing conclusive about the nature of that path or the involvement of destiny or free will. That’s a separate issue entirely, I think.

This is where I slip into mysterian philosophy, as I always do when I consider this sort of thing. I talk myself in circles (as I just did) and eventually conclude that we probably can’t know the answer, that we aren’t capable of comprehending it, that it’s possible for something like free will and something like destiny to both be at play, and for that to be beyond our ability to understand. It’s where I say that our understanding of this is akin to an ant’s understanding of the suspension bridge it’s walking on the surface of. Regardless of the tools or time or desire to make the ant understand, it is so completely beyond its capacity that even the suggestion is ludicrous.

It’s not a perfect analogy, probably not even a good one, but it’s the best I’ve come up with so far. It’s not good because the ant has no desire to understand, and no capacity to ask the questions. We do. I think the lack-of-capacity part of it probably works, but the fact that we can ask the questions is a fundamental difference.

And while having an answer doesn’t really have a direct effect on our day to day life, it is still there within us, and if we are sensitive and aware humans, we are almost forced to come up with some answer, even if we know the answer is a placeholder and very incomplete and unsatisfactory.

Our philosophies and religions are those placeholders, constructed pacifiers for us to suck on as we sooth ourselves against the torment of our ability to ask questions we cannot answer.