Sinking In A Swimming Pool

There is a peaceful solitude to submerging in a pool and hanging around at the bottom for a while. Water diffuses sound, so whatever noise is occuring above the surface becomes calmed and muted below. The sensation of floating and the rapid micro-bubbles that flit around your body add to the zen-like experience.

Being Invisible

It is a small fantasy of mine to become invisible. My desire to be unnoticed usually presents itself when the pressures of life bear down on me so much that I instinctually retreat into my subconscious. When I feel the need to withdraw from reality, some aspect of the environment I am in becomes my secret hideaway. If I am in the bathroom washing up, it is down in the shadows between the bottles of moisturizer, shaving cream, and hair gel. If I am in the park, it is the recess between the roots of a large tree. It is usually a place that is small, dark, and cozy. There, I wish I were lying safe, where no one could find me.

My desire to not be found comes from a barely conscious longing to experience the sense of safety I had as a child – to regain the feeling of certain surroundings filling me with comfort and security, as a five year-old who climbs into his parents’ bed after a bad dream. Somewhere in time we lost the inviolable security we had as children, and I often miss it, and resent that I must now take full care of myself.

The inevitability of becoming a noticeable entity that is constantly at the whim of its environment is difficult to accept. Invisibility tempts me with its promise to provide a complete respite from the worries and fears of the outside world. While I do value my self-dependence, sometimes it would just feel good to wrap myself in the security of anonymity, and let everyone and everything go.

Live Your Life

Forty years from now, you will nostalgize about today. You will think back to the present moment, recalling how youth was full of choices and hopefulness. You will marvel at how blissfully uninformed you were about what the future held in store for you. The life you live right now will be a distant, golden memory.

Knowing how much you will value these days when you are older, how can you allow yourself to hurry through life? How can you not realize that every shred of your short existence is valuable? Each time you notice your days disappearing into an anonymous past, it should become more evident that you need to be living life as consciously as possible.

We all wonder sometimes about the purpose of life; often, we do so because we are searching for a way to justify death. And yet, the only way to understand death is to fully experience our everyday lives. Living life consciously involves thoughtful observation – not just of the outside world, but of our inner life. We should be taking note of our sense of identity at a particular time – our level of confidence, our anxieties, our far-flung wishes. If we have some record of our state of being at a given point in time, we can observe our personal evolution and ultimately gain some insight into our patterns and purpose.

And yet, as arduous as it may seem to keep track of all of our internal and external events, the feat can be achieved easily if we simply relax our definition of time. If we can view time as an invention of humans – and therefore not as linear and infinitely-accumulating as it seems in the abstract – we realize that life, and memory, are our collage to paste together however we wish. All the clues we need to figure out life’s meaning come from examining the collage as a whole and finding patterns of passion, compulsion, and purpose.

Therefore, experience the present vividly as it unfolds. In an ecstatic moment, allow the chemicals in your brain to percolate. Taste the pleasure as it pours out. In a bitter moment, allow the pins of pain to push through you. Fight the urge to close your eyes. Imbibe and absorb your emotions as if you were a child experiencing them for the first time. It is only through active involvement in your life, however exciting or mundane, that you can start to draw conclusions about why you are here.

In the end, this kind of conscious existence will give you far more solace than even the most successful unexamined life. For only those who have a clear vision of living can accept their passage into the next expanse.

Is Fate Real?

Fate is a concept we all formed a definite opinion on at a young age. Nowadays, we rarely give it existence real consideration, instead using it as a quick explanation for situations we can’t understand, stating “That’s the way it was meant to be.” But is fate real?

Is it immutable that I should be sitting here right now, typing on this computer, with this bottle of water placed exactly as it is on this table in front of me? I can move the water bottle, or the table, into countless random positions, so it doesn’t feel like the whereabouts of these objects are carved into the mold of my destiny. However, if that bottle blocked a bullet, or got knocked over and spilled, forcing me to go buy another one at the supermarket where I subsequently met my future wife, it would suddenly acquire the magical seal of fate.

Indeed, if magical-seeming events always shaped the important circumstances in my life, I would certainly believe in fate. However, when I think of some of the seminal characteristics of who I am -  my career, my relationships, and my knowledge – none of them were built from anything that smacks of a divine plan. Instead, it seems as though my life has been fashioned from my own purposeful actions. And yet, I still know that fate has played a very important role.

Fate, to me, is the part of life that you can’t control. Fate is nature: it is your physical makeup, it is your parents, it is the place you were raised. It is your unique chemical composition. Fate is also the random things that occur around you that you have no say in, like weather, and other people’s actions.

The events of our lives are dictated by a mix between fate and free will. Our core personality, health, and situation in life are things that have been fated to us. The decisions we make are our own free will. Relationships between people are a complex mixture of the two. They are one part your free will, one part the other person’s free will, and one part the interaction between those free wills. Exactly how the latter part breaks down – the way people’s attributes and actions intermingle, and all the chemical twists and turns that determine the ultimate state of the relationship – are a matter of fate.

Once we acknowledge the existence of free will, it becomes apparent that our situations in life are largely built by us, with fate giving us only a starting point and some surprises along the way. Those who wait for fate to deliver their entire lives will achieve far less than they desire. If we allow fate to act alone, our todays would transition uneventfully into our tomorrows. We’d grow up in the house we were born in, then move to the next logical place based on outside influences; we’d keep the friends we met in elementary school and acquire a few new ones along the way; and we’d go into careers that befit our earliest interests without much thought of what else we’d like to explore. Very few extraordinary things would occur.

And it is precisely those extraordinary things – those acts of free will that disrupt the normal, passive flow of life – that make our time on earth exciting. These things can be small or big. They can be forcing yourself to go out to a social event that you don’t feel like going to, or challenging a deep, longstanding fear.

When I picture all the places I could have grown up in, all the people I could have met, and all the career paths I could have been driven towards, I see the interplay of fate and free will at work.  There were many different lives within the fate I was dealt: could have been a psychologist, a painter, an actor, maybe even a religious teacher; but instead I became who I am. I like to think that I chose a worthwhile existence.

It is important that people recognize the limitations of their fate – but more importantly, that they recognize the vastness of the possibilities they control with their free will. While we cannot do absolutely anything, we can do so many things that we can consistently surprise ourselves, and make our lives as unique and meaningful as we wish.