Perfect unpredictability

I hear the ancient footsteps like the motion of the sea
Sometimes I turn, there's someone there, other times it's only me
I am hanging in the balance of the reality of man
Like every sparrow falling, like every grain of sand

— "Every Grain of Sand", Bob Dylan, Shot of Love

Life sometimes signals you in ways you do not expect. In one sense, every single day is an adventure where you may (or may not) have some plans and you constantly wager against Fate for your future. If you take seriously the idea of how much the outside world, inanimate or not, does not care about your yearnings and desires, you realize that can be a complete blessing.

When I was younger, still living with my parents in Brasília, for some time I had a car. My brother, going his way through medicine residency, lived in São Paulo and left his silver Renault. It was amazing that I had a car, until it broke down and I had to get it fixed. The brakes had an issue. The next time, it was a hit-and-run by a person leaving my car dented. And once, it was my fault, I confess. That's when I first took a glimpse at what it means to have a car — it means to take a trade-off where you get to listen to "Stompin' at the Savoy" by Benny Goodman while gaily driving and you let go of the predictability of having to go places on foot, when you know your limits, you can plan ahead and virtually never fail to reach your goal. I wish I had taken some time off to ponder about this issue a lot more at the time, because that is probably the greatest thing a young man can learn — other than "it goes real fast, and if you're not careful, it's too late".

Twice in the past twelve months have I been taken aback by how dreadful life can get, and twice has it been because of life circumstances taking cheap shots at me, due to no one's fault exactly. And if there is such a person to blame, I'd rather not know nor think about it, because of the biggest lesson I've had: if you do not give life a chance of redeeming itself, if such a possibility is taken as a hostage by an evildoer, it will never accept beauty and bliss.

Often, we are tempted to consider ourselves the person to blame. In The Sickness Unto Death, Kierkegaard meditates on this individual for a while. Defining sin (and despair) as "before God ... in despair not wanting to be oneself, or wanting in despair to be oneself", the Dane describes at a point the kind of Pollyanna figures we sometimes see in real life that refuse to see the irreversibility of some bad events. Time moves exclusively forward, and these people do not realize that their possibilities only narrow down with its march. Everything is possible, they think, there will always be another chance. So they make their efforts half-heartedly because there's nothing at stake. But one day they will realize how much time they lost, and will despair over it.

This bubble-headed optimist then turns into their own opposite, refusing to see any light. In the realm of possibility, though, lies God, the one who can turn the impossible into something concrete. But if the person does not see the possibility, they turn to fatality. And as Camus puts it in The Rebel, you can only go so far when this is your philosophical outlook:

Nietzschean asceticism, which begins with the recognition of fatality, ends in a deification of fate. The more implacable destiny is, the more it becomes worthy of adoration.

And, after realizing all the possibilities were for nothing, the individual becomes cynical. His own suffering becomes the proof that he is right and there is no redemption. Kierkegaard observes:

If it should now happen that God in heaven and all the angels were to offer to help him to be rid of this torment — no, he does not want that, now it is too late. Once he would gladly have given everything to be rid of this agony, but he was kept waiting, and now all that’s past; he prefers to rage against everything and be the one whom the whole world, all existence, has wronged, the one for whom it is especially important to ensure that he has his agony on hand, so that no one will take it from him – for then he would not be able to convince others and himself that he is right.

My car was just one simple example of things that work fine 99% of the time because of complex systems that we never think about: the mechanics of the car, the brakes, the availability of gasoline. These things are a very delicate balance that one should never take for granted. The naïve optimist puts himself in a position of taking everything for granted. Had they known that their chances are not coming back, they would have made the best out of them. But when we realize it, it's not over. It's only beginning. We can still cast a shadow, even if a faint one, and we can still leave a footprint, even if a small one.

But, of course, the younger the person, the harder for them to understand this truth, and as I am no wise old man, that certainly includes me.

Any marginally mature person understands that we cannot live in an atomized society where nothing but our own desires are taken account for. Civilization does not merely suppress our instincts, as Freud argues in Civilization and its Enemies. As individuals, we cannot have enough information to get conscious decisions about everything, and our desires are often wrong because of it. Marriage, for instance, is a game theoretic solution to a very difficult problem of organizing society and individual lives, which Enlightnement skeptics did not understand and some rationalists to this day cannot comprehend.

Not everything that happens in life is good, but it might open doors to beauty and appreciation where otherwise you would not have seen them. We depend on things we have no idea of what they are nor how they work, and it is often better for that to be the case. Do you really want to be conscious of everything that can go wrong in your life, things that you are not even aware of? Or would you rather accept life as it comes, and appreciate how bad things are not?

It's not a surprise for me that there is a concept such as the Dark Night of the Soul. Before acknowledging that "all is well and/ All matter of thing shall be well", T.S. Eliot calls for us to "Descend lower, descend only/ Into the world of perpetual solitude". There, we will be tempted to forever get “distracted from distraction by distraction”, in a manner that is perfectly rational and controlled, but completely devoid of life.

Well, I'd rather invite the unpredictability and the possible instability if that means I'll be living. My plans are not God's plans, and all shall be well. As our favorite deeply closeted gay man says,

it’s true I lost it all a few times. But that’s because I always took the long shot and it never came in. But I still have some time before I cross that river. And if you’re at the table and you’re rolling them bones, then there’s no money in playing it safe. You have to take all your chips and put them on double six and watch as every eye goes to you and then to those red dice doing their wild dance and freezing time before finding the cruel green felt.

Merry Christmas and a happy New Year! Remember to enjoy life and not take anything for granted, because God is taking care of even what is vital yet goes unseen by your very limited and ungrateful human eyes.