We might as well sail into the channel.
I wonder, do the things in our lives ever leave us?
Douglas Hofstadter, in his book, I Am A Strange Loop, would probably argue that they don’t. He makes a convincing (fairly mathematical) argument that human consciousness is a strange loop of experience, building on itself every time something happens to us. Allowing, we might say, other people to become part of our souls (but that’s a story for another article).
These things become part of us.
If you marinate, for example, in a set of ideas about creativity, habits, and productivity… then you start to see everything through that lens. Everything can be broken down into doing just enough, today, so that in a few years, something magical will happen.
If you marinate in terror for years, something different happens, I imagine.
But then it’s more than that, because the things we learn are passed on to future generations. Just as we received things from the generations before us.
Not genetically - well, maybe genetically. But more… the stories ripple down the generations, as each human grapples with making sense of a cruel world.
The coping mechanisms ripple down the generations.
We aren’t taught, because they weren’t taught, because they weren’t taught.
We suffer, because she suffered, because he suffered, because this thing happened.
Long ago.
Long forgotten, it might be, the thing that happened to us.
Inconsequential, and yet… not inconsequential, because it is part of us forever.
Every tiny interaction wrapped up into the sum of our experience, Hofstadter’s I. Kahneman’s System One, maybe.
So that today our intuition guides us based on that. On all those things. The things that never leave us.
If we let it.
And yet this world seems unnavigable sometimes.
At least, there isn’t always a clear course.
We simply sail forwards, driven by the winds and the tides, into the storm.
The choice is one narrow channel between jagged rocks.
Or another narrow channel between jagged rocks.
And the person at the tiller, the captain, simply has to choose. Based, perhaps, on the sum of their experience.
Choose the unknown.
Choose one of the unclear courses.
Not knowing if it will end in a cliff face or in the open sea, clear skies.
If the captain is lucky, he may have a first officer to offer counsel.
If she is lucky, she may have skilled sailors to ride that channel, risking everything because… well, because we have to keep sailing.
The world won’t stop for us.
And if we’re here, and the wind is blowing, and the storm is rolling in, then there’s no point dying here.
We might as well sail into the channel.
Let’s see what awaits us.
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This is the latest in a series of articles written using the 12-Minute Method: write for twelve minutes, proof read once with tiny edits and then post online.
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