Anything Can Happen

Perhaps an asterisk now that I'm 80

I’ve been thinking about taking off ten pounds. I think deeply about it when I help myself to a second portion of pasta and when my pants don’t fit. I think about how much better I’d look if I didn’t so resemble my mother at 80. My mother was a tiny person with small bones who ballooned later in life and had to go out and replace her wardrobe at the dawn of a time when she was losing interest in clothes. I described my situation to Dr. C when I went in for my annual physical recently. But Dr. C, he of the expensive shirts and the Gujarati accent, told me absolutely not to go on a diet. He said the risk of falling and breaking an uncushioned hip far outweighed the benefits to my vanity. He said about my weight gain several times during the visit, “I’m not worried. I’m not worried.” I thought, this is the kind of doctor you want. One who isn’t worried and doesn’t want you to go on a diet. Accordingly, Frank and I went out for ice cream after dinner. I took only my phone and he took only his various keys so when we finally secured a parking spot at Baskin-Robbins, we realized that neither of us was carrying any cash or credit and there would be no Chocolate Therapy for us.

Photo by Jen Theodore on Unsplash

At this point, someone out there is thinking, if not saying out loud, Everything Happens for a Reason. No money, no ice cream, no additional weight gain or testing the limits of the doctor’s confidence. I’m not buying it, even if I did have the five bucks for the small container. This is not an instance of the butterfly effect where a tiny, unrelated element in the larger field influences an event far away. To attribute the failure at Baskin-Robbins to some kind of hidden agency would be to undervalue the importance of chance in the acquisition of ice cream and reduce the complex interplay of factors to a simple direct causality, in other words to privilege magic. It would be to ignore the obvious truth that shit happens and, often, for no reason at all. This is sometimes hard to accept. People want certainty and there’s no certainty more potent than Everything Happens for a Reason. Part of the challenge in this time of chaos we’re living through is that we’re increasingly called upon to forego certainty and face contradiction. The faster we’re able to communicate, the less we have to say. The more futuristic the AI cultural landscape, the less visionary, indeed the more medieval, our social arrangements. The more fragmented our lives, the greater the injunction to conform to a narrow range of extremist beliefs. Complex causality tests our ability to make sense out of all this. It’s much easier to say Everything Happens for a Reason and leave it at that and this is what religion in its most basic form has always been so good at. God moves in mysterious ways. Fuhgettaboutit.

This worldview does a disservice to all forms of human creative expression. It bypasses scientific understanding but it also undermines spiritual values that foster a rich soil of wholeness and an awareness of interbeing. Instead of speaking from inside of living and dying, recognizing the matrix of causes that always exist in relation to one another, reductionist religion, whether old-timey or new age, posits a force outside of life that dictates what will happen and knows the reasons for events in advance. It turns the sacred nature of life and death into the efforts of an all-knowing puppeteer, turning a symphony of sound into a nursery rhyme. If I were to pick the one fortune cookie most appropriate to our situation, it would not be Everything Happens for a Reason. It would be my old favorite, Beware the Man of One Book.

Thinking and feeling and connecting with one another are the most profound forms of resistance to mind control. We are under assault by the depredations of the algorithm, the narrowing of the arena of free speech, the inclination to return to discredited systems of social control in the family and at the ballot box. All of this tightening of the reins presupposes and further promotes a loss of agency in the individual heart and a dangerous determinism that makes no room for changing your mind, forgetting your wallet. It is imperative to stretch our awareness to make room for the wild unpredictable energy of life, the element of surprise that shows up and laughs along with us when we least suspect it.

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