Time, Direction, and Free Will
Driving through the Mojave Desert of Arizona from Los Angeles to Saginaw, Michigan
Reflection given at Interfaith Communities United for Justice and Peace – April 30th, 2021.
Life, lately, has been a lot like looking out of the window; actually looking at the old “Route 66” through the Mojave desert of California and Arizona, into New Mexico and the Texas panhandle where the landscape transformed into vast manicured fields peppered with giant wind turbines for mile after mile, and on into the soft, green wooded farmland of Oklahoma and Missouri, so reminiscent of England, before leading into the wide open plains of southern Illinois and Indiana, and from there into “Pure Michigan”, as it branded itself at the border, where I was eventually headed.
I was delivering a van load of items, mainly furniture, that I had for the most part acquired over the past twelve months or so on my regular walks and bike rides into the Hollywood Hills, in order to furnish an old home I purchased last year in the city of Saginaw for less than one would pay, I discovered from my frequent visits to Home Depot, for a super-sized Tuff garden shed!
Developing this house and furnishing it with items either retrieved from trash, put out into the street, donated, or otherwise found in thrift stores or in auctions, I have regarded as something of an art project. At times, I consider it may all be nothing more than folly, but I take pleasure and even some pride in refurbishing and in making good what others have tossed aside.
Meanwhile, there are those who would say that all this so-called art project or folly was beyond my own control; an inevitability given the passing of time going back as far as the origins of the Big Bang. I say this because I was staggered to read in an article by Oliver Burkeman, published earlier this week in The Guardian newspaper, entitled “The Clockwork Universe – Is Free Will an Illusion?” about a growing school of thought that denies the existence of free will.
Such philosophers and scientists understand human behavior as something entirely pre-ordained – an inevitability – attributing all our thoughts, choices and subsequent actions as being something beyond our own individual control; relieving us of either admonition or admiration for all that comes to pass.
One might argue that such a philosophical concept, while being obscure, is the domain and abstract thought of a privileged and possibly idle few for which the overwhelming majority of us have no time; or, if we do, our considerations are upon far more pressing needs, such as those of “Gnarly”, a homeless man living under the 101 freeway on Gower St. in Hollywood for at least the past year who I have befriended and who, incidentally, is gifted works of art most of which he offers to me at a price such that some of them can now be found hanging on the walls of my house in Saginaw.
But there are others, myself included, who would actually deem such philosophical consideration to be essential. All of which reminds me of a poem, one of the earliest I ever wrote after falling into a dreamlike state in which I saw myself as a very old man, teetering upon death; and I knew in that moment I could wish for anything, and so I wished to be young again. And then I awoke to discover that I was now young again, that very same old man. I called the poem ‘Time and Direction’ and, in addressing this theme, I recall it here:
‘Where am I going?’ I asked myself one day,
I smiled at this then smiling still said ‘to the grave’;
‘But what will I pass?’ I asked again that day.
‘Oh, this and that’ I thought, for I was thinking now,
‘But nothing much’, I mused.
Then stirring on this point I sensed that I would greatly miss
So much of life unless I thought about it now;
And there I sat, a long, long time ago.
A consideration of this mystery called life is, to me, essential and one that never goes away; though coming back to freewill, and whether it exists or not I have to concede, in my opinion at least, that it does, but not exclusively. I understand life as being dual-poled; a duality: free will operating together with Divine Will as a natural force – like gravity, or karma, pulling us towards or against something other, something greater than our individual selves.
By which token I would say that we can and do indeed choose, and are responsible for our every thought and all resulting actions, each of which has a consequence that plays out against a greater Will that is ultimate, holding everything together in abeyance with all Creation, endlessly guiding us one way or another through Evolution or Involution.
Shakespeare, in one of my favorite quotes, wrote “There’s a divinity which shapes our ends rough hew them how we will”; while Christ more simply stated that “As you sow, so shall you reap”, similar to the Buddha who informed us that “Action and reaction are opposite and equal.”
Our lives matter, made up of millions – even billions – of tiny thoughts and actions all measured against the Divine Will, each to be made in consideration not just for ourselves but also for our fellow man and indeed for all life in its infinite manifestations of Absolute Oneness.
Driving from California to Michigan gazing out of the window, allows one time to ponder these things and mull them over in a timeless questioning of life and of our divine purpose for being here.