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| Before the origin |
Why are we here? I have asked myself several times and for several years and my answers have varied between complicated and easy. But almost of all them were just fancier ways of saying ‘for nothing in particular’
I have been a pseudo thinker since my early days. I remember clearly how eager I would be to visit a small library run by an ex-military general in an Army colony. On most occasions I would stick to staples like Alistair Maclean and Michael Crichton but on some occasions I would grab a book that I barely understood. And with that half-baked knowledge I would prowl in school to hunt on my classmates who at that point were rightly far more interested in creating a dust storm during our lunch breaks.
But the question remained and it aged like wine. I attempted to understand Stephan Hawking’s brief history of time and then chaos theory. As I grew older, I understood the facts only a tad more but was able to create tangible tangents far more significantly. It was roughly during that time I questioned God himself. Now I realize that I was actually questioning religion.
I recently watched a good movie called ‘Predestination’ and it re-opened healed wounds. Ever since I moved to Germany, I narrowed my vision down to a span of few years. In this narrowed vision, relevancy is very apparent. Your actions seem to affect outcomes and you feel largely in control of your destiny. The matter of free will is quickly settled upon. Of course it exists and you possess it. I chose to sell a Lotus and move to smaller apartment. That wasn’t a chance event.
But the movie proposes an alternative. It questions the very concept of free will and suggests that there is no such a thing. That everything we do, we ever did and we ever will do is pre decided. That despite our best attempts, we cannot rewrite the future. If anything our best way out is to not affront this truth but rather accept it and make peace with the known way forward.
The theory is preposterous but only because we look at it from a very small time span. If I expand the horizon just a tad bit more, I am not convinced that I am here because of my free will. I am not sure that every decision I ever took was entirely independent of factors beyond my control. What is perhaps scarier is how irrelevant most of it appears when you don’t look at your life microscopically. I don’t think it applies only to average or above average folks like me but even to the 1%. Even they, with their million dollar yachts, are entirely sailing on free will.
It is a shame that theology is so closely connected with religion and belief. Chaos theory offered a non-faith based explanation but it still permitted drastically different outcomes. Predestination is just the opposite. The end is defined, no matter which way you go.
Ferrari designed a poor formula 1 car four years in a row. Israel is trigger happy. Anti-aircraft missiles are bringing down civilian planes. In a land of 1.2 billion people, the Indian cricket team still can’t find one bowler who isn’t a scarecrow of some sorts. Germany is considering taxing its autobahns and she is considering what content can attract Germans. All of this is very pertinent now but none of it is if you just look somewhere else.
It is then a matter of perspective and your level of zoom. When you get to the pixels you see relevancy, impact and the ability to affect change. When you zoom out, you see pre-decided irrelevancy and fallacy of your actions. And when you do that on warm humid summer night in Germany, alone in your living room, this realization stuns you.
Just as it did a few years ago in a living room in Ann Arbor and just as it will in a few years’ time, in a city that was meant to be mine!
