How do we make meaningful choices?

This book is about infinite possible futures.

It’s similar to Borges ‘Library of Babel’, but has the protagonist (Nora) explore all the infinite versions of the life she could have lived. She starts from a place of despair- a suicide attempt- and finds herself in a space in-between life and death called the ‘Midnight Library’

From there, she has the option to pick any ‘life’ she could think of. What if she had made different choices? What if she had asked out that person, or accepted a job offer, or moved location, or any number of infinite choices?

And from all these infinite choices, which is the ‘right’ choice exactly? What is the ‘best life’.

The Midnight Library is an exploration of contentment, regret, loss and love.

This is a timely book because I’ve been thinking about all the possible futures that could have been. What would have happened if I had chosen my medical training elsewhere, what would have happened if I hadn’t chosen to break off a relationship, what would have happened if I hadn’t had a bereavement. What if I had chosen to take a year off. What if I had said yes to a meaningless audit and scored an extra point on my application that led to being in a different location. What if I had said yes or no to countless opportunities. The list goes on ad infinitum.

How do we know that the choices we make are the ‘right’ choices? In an alternate universe where you chose the opposite, would life be ‘better’? Would it be worse? How do we make meaningful choices?

Two roads diverged in a wood… What if there are more than two roads… what of if there is no end to the choices you could make. What would Robert Frost do?

The Choice is not the issue

Worrying about cause and effect in the grand scheme is a recipe for suffering. You can choose choices, but not outcomes.

Whatever choice you make. It’s gone.

Regret is a thought. All the possible futures are simply thoughts arising in the mind that we confuse for reality. It is impossible to quantify whether the series of choices that you made differently could have ‘ended’ in a better outcomes, because ultimately each path she took had its own meaning, purpose and sense of both pleasure and pain.

Pain and pleasure exist. Regardless of whether Nora became a world famous Swimmer or a suicidal drug addict. People died. Friendships ended. Conversely, each life had its own joys. Each ‘life’ came with ‘good’ and bad’.

In one version, after exploring fame, wealth, intellectual pursuits etc, she becomes a mother, living in Cambridge, happily married, everything seemingly content. She can choose to stay in that life if she ’truly wants it’. Yet even that slips beyond her and she returns to the Midnight library, because it is not real.

In the end, all possible futures don’t exist, because they are fictions. When one holds onto them too tightly, they cause suffering, because they implicitly say ‘that this life is not good enough’.

In reality, this moment is perfect. The universe is perfect. It’s only in the mind that imperfection arises.

The prison wasn’t the place, but the perspective.

Change the way you see

And so Nora returns to her life. The ‘root’ life where she took the overdose. Where all the choices she made, were made as they were. But she comes back seeing differently. Because life ‘just is’. It is the way we see it that imbues it with meaning.

She realises that the choices she made are neither ‘good nor bad’, but as Shakespeare said ‘only thinking makes it so’. It’s the way you look at life. She saw that in this timeline, her brother was still alive, she was giving piano lessons to a kid (who in another timeline got involved in a bad crowd and went to prison), and that her best friend in New Zealand didn’t die in a car crash. There was both pleasure and pain in this life, but she could ultimately choose what to look at.

The issue was she was searching for meaning outside of herself. In a universe devoid of ultimate meaning, it is YOU, who chooses what is meaningful.

The arrow of time, entropy marches continually forward. The choices we make are neither good nor bad. When comparing choices you should look inwards, and create reasons generated internally.

Every path is the right path.

The future will arrive. A never-ending series of infinite crossroads diverging into infinite roads, ending in the same destination. The beauty is realising : every choice is the right choice. Life is a playground.

I’ll end with this passage in the book

“ It is easy to mourn the lives we aren’t living. Easy to wish we’d developed other talents, said yes to different offers. Easy to wish we’d worked harder, loved better, handled our finances more astutely, been more popular, stayed in the band, gone to Australia, said yes to the coffee or done more bloody yoga. It takes no effort to miss the friends we didn’t make and the work we didn’t do and the people we didn’t marry and the children we didn’t have. It is not difficult to see yourself through the lens of other people, and to wish you were all the different kaleidoscopic versions of you they wanted you to be. It is easy to regret, and keep regretting, ad infinitum, until our time runs out. But it is not the lives we regret not living that are the real problem. It is the regret itself. It’s the regret that makes us shrivel and wither and feel like our own and other people’s worst enemy. We can’t tell if any of those other versions would have been better or worse. Those lives are happening, it is true, but you are happening as well, and that is the happening we have to focus on. Of course, we can’t visit every place or meet every person or do every job, yet most of what we’d feel in any life is still available. We don’t have to play every game to know what winning feels like. We don’t have to hear every piece of music in the world to understand music. We don’t have to have tried every variety of grape from every vineyard to know the pleasure of wine. Love and laughter and fear and pain are universal currencies. We just have to close our eyes and savour the taste of the drink in front of us and listen to the song as it plays. We are as completely and utterly alive as we are in any other life and have access to the same emotional spectrum. We only need to be one person. We only need to feel one existence. We don’t have to do everything in order to be everything, because we are already infinite. While we are alive we always contain a future of multifarious possibility. So let’s be kind to the people in our own existence.”

Mr Nobody is another one of my favourite films that explores this topic. Here is an essay by ‘Like Stories of Old’ :

“Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they are finished” Dan Gilbert

We are in a state of constant becoming. Every thought, intention, action is creating grooves in the psyche. As the adage goes : intention leads to thought which leads to feeling which leads to action, which leads to habit, which ultimately becomes character.

When you look at a building. You might see a solid fixed entity. But the reality is that the bricks are changing at the micro level. At the macro level, tenants are moving in and out, repairs being made, signs being put up and taken down. The building is a process.

You are a process too. You are never quite fully there, because each moment you are changing. A new thought is arising. You are interacting with the world in a different way. Biologically the brain is being remodelled, the body is changing, sensations arising and passing away. Behaviourally, you change. You are learning, and hopefully growing.

The self is a process, not a fixed entity. This can even be visualised on an introspective level through meditation by watching the impermanence of phenomenon.

Thoughts appear and disappear. Sensations arise and pass away. Views change. We put on different faces around different people.

How do we then think about identity, when we are in flux.

Identity as a map

I think of identity as a map. It is an abstraction that you can signal with. It’s a snapshot of a vast complicated network of influences, a way to encapsulate human experience in a word.

This is useful, as you can infer a lot about someone through a word. If you both identity, as Christians/Atheist/Agnostic, you can have that shared connection.

But remember : the map is not the territory. When people give you their identity, it often leads to :

1. Jumping to conclusions based on prior experience, rather than experiencing anew. So you never truly ‘see’ someone. Solution : Beginners mind. Drop expectation

2. When you create an identity for yourself, you feel beholden to it. That you must maintain a semblance of consistency. Instead : When the evidence changes, change your mind. Don’t hold onto identities. Have one of course, but hold onto it very lightly

This ultimately goes to the Zen point of Beginners mind. Empty your cup. Begin anew.

Die to Each Moment

“No man steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river and he is not the same man” - Heraclitus

If we view life as radically impermanent- dying to each moment, the passage of time inexorably marching forward, then we can drop preconceived notions of how it ‘should be’ and instead accept ‘how it is’.

This is a ‘awe’ inspiring stance in the literal sense of the word. You begin to see without expectation, reward. Each moment becomes precious. Green becomes greener. The world becomes a magical place - as Blake said you can see the ‘world in a grain of sand’.

Thought can be ‘noticed’. Thoughts of how it should be, and could be, and was. Thoughts that (if unseen), leave an indelible mark on experience. That ‘this is not good enough’. The fundamental human delusion. Would it not be liberating to drop that at least for a while?

I forgot where I read this - but when asked how a man was able to see the world with such joy and childlike innocence, he said ‘I say yes.To everything that happens, I say yes’.

Dying to each moment, viewing it as impermanence, leads to acceptance which leads to peace.

Processes in life

Writing is a process. One never truly goes into writing something knowing exactly how it is going to turn out. It is a changing entity and deeply interconnected. It can trigger cascades of thought during writing, and even years after. I may read this when I’m 40, and that will hopefully set off new ideas in my (future) head. (But of course 40 year old self is almost unimaginable, because it too is a process).

Relationships are process. The coming together of two individuals, who then coalesce and morph. Usually couples become more similar to each other. They grow and change, and maybe even grow and change apart. Part of healthy relationships is realising this, and seeing your partner‘anew’ each moment, not holding onto images of the past.

Thoughts are processes. A useful exercise is to sit and observe thought. Where did it come from. ‘Who’ is thinking this. Where does the thought go. These of course themselves are thoughts which can be noticed. With closer observation, one can see that thoughts arise and pass away, they change, appear and disappear. They are constantly becoming.

TLDR : Life is a verb. Not a noun.

To me, photography is an art of observation. It’s about finding something interesting in an ordinary place… I’ve found it has little to do with the things you see and everything to do with the way you see them.” — Elliott Erwitt

I want to document more. To become a better photographer. Inspired mostly by Simon Sarris’s post.

A way of seeing

I used to be of the opinion that taking photos takes you out of the moment. But I’m coming to realise, that pondering a photo allows you to see with greater detail

You are paying more attention to visual stimuli. Noticing how the light falls on the subject, how colours intermingle and mix, and how framing creates a narrative.

Simon Sarris talks about how one should document the mundane. It allows you to see details that you once took for granted. To pay deeper attention to life. Observation is a skill you can develop and train. It is a rediscovering of the ordinary

Narrative building and posterity

I want to create. Write fiction. Photography is another medium I can do this. As they say, a picture paints a thousand words.

I enjoy going through photo books. Possibly for the same reason I enjoy writing in a journal. It’s a way to craft the ‘story’ of a life. Your life is a narrative you create, most of it is up to your interpretation. This can be incredibly useful as it allows you to reframe events such that you suffer less.

By taking photographs, I can capture a moment of time. A echo of photons etched onto a digital sensor. Another reminder perhaps of impermanence. And then the magic of memory can ‘fill in the gaps’ to whateverinterpretation I want, to choose to specific ways of remembering.

Take more photos

Approaching 26, I think I would regret not documenting more. More importantly, I want to cultivate certain ways of seeing. Paying attention. Stephen Batchelor writes about this way of attending and how it “leads away from fascination with the extraordinary and back to a rediscovery of the ordinary”.

This YouTube video captures the idea of ‘documenting the mundane’ :

Delete more photos

Paradoxically, you want to delete 90% of the photos you do take. I struggle to delete, so I instead just curate. Pick a few good ones. When you look back, you only need one or two to remind you of a moment.

You are not seeking to capture every single event that happens. But more bring back the ‘feeling’.

We do not remember days, we remember moments - Cesare Pavese