Notes from midair

Is it possible to do or be anything "by accident" anymore? As someone with an ever accumulating list of birthdays (44 this past month!), it is becoming possible to perceive the assumption on the part of many people nowadays that everything they see around them is almost entirely deliberate or purposeful, as on a movie set. The voice, the hair, the clothes... all precisely manicured and curated for just that carefully considered effect, whatever the context. The reality show has left the studio. How to explain to the young that things were not always like this? That sometimes, things used to just... happen? Can we truly believe in a world at least occasionally unburdened by an intense desire to manipulate or control the reactions of others through artifice?

Eventually you reach a point in life where you realize there is a limit to what can be reasonably planned in advance, and that the whole notion of unconstrained free choice on the part of rational actors - the holy writ undergirding much of late-stage capitalism and a lot else besides - is severely undercut on a daily, hourly, even minute-by-minute basis by the slow accumulation of habit, history and inertia. (Not to mention inattention or ignorance). The notion of dependent origination in Buddhism appears at last no mere dogma; that all dharmas rely on the emergence or existence of other dharmas ought to be regarded as empirical a result as any, if we are both honest with ourselves and paying sufficient attention. We continue to believe we are fashioning ourselves, sculpting the content and meaning of our lives through a series of choices, yet year upon year the array of options to choose among seems not to increase - as some once thought inevitable - but to become somehow smaller. The planet perhaps cannot ultimately entertain every one of our heartfelt wishes, unless our wishes be made so mundane as to fly in the face of desire itself.

Having made such hard-won realizations, now with a slightly stooped back, with mysterious and novel pains beginning to spread through fingers, feet and knees, with a glassy, far-off gaze from a few too many sleepless nights, hazy mornings and chemical sunsets, any successful program having at the core of its focus "the ablation of desire", as Leopardi called it, will without any doubt prove its worth many times over to its adherents.