Baffled--MC
Why we do whatever it is that we do is a question that has been nagging for a few days now. By whatever I mean anything at all, including the sentence I am writing now, even as I am thinking about what to say next. But before I write this I am distracted by a strand of grey hair on my keyboard, specifically on the letter V. As I try to pick it up it slides down to the spacebar. I eventually pick it up and throw it on the floor knowing that soon enough I am going to sweep my house anyway.
That short routine I just described forms but a tiny part of my question about why we do whatever it is that we do. While there may be certain predictability in our routines generally speaking our actions are random. For instance, I am fidgety in the middle of writing this post, occasionally looking out of the window even while scratching my right eyebrow and then taking my handkerchief out to stifle an oncoming sneeze. My mother used to call me satpatiyo in Gujarati which loosely translates into someone who is fidgety. As a younger man I was sure that but with age I am a little more anchored although there are many instances during any given day when the satpatiyo in me takes over.
Connected to the question of why we do whatever it is we do is the deeper question of whether there is any deliberateness at all to our existence in the broadest sense of the word or we are just lifeforms whose actions are mostly randomized. Anything that we do could go any number of ways. For instance, I can stop typing right here…. and then get up, walk to a window look out a bit and come back to finish this sentence “right here…”
Do that as an exercise and find out whether anything you do is eventually deliberate or just random set of bodily movements which result into something. Try and be the observer and the observed at the same time. It is not possible to do both at once because the moment you turn an observer the observed ceases if it happens to be you and vice versa. You would be amazed how of what we do at any given time is not necessarily well thought out. It is almost as if we choose a behavioral direction for the day or the hour or the minute arbitrarily and then just go along. But do we really? I ask because I find even within that there is no real predictability to it. It is just one random happening after another. That is how life is lived and that is how it ends.
What am I going to do next is not a question I ask myself much. With advancing years, I ask it even less because you know that whatever you were going to do, you have done quite a bit of that already. I turn 60 on January 6 which means if we consider 80 to be the average lifespan, I have already spent over 70 percent of my existential time. So by definition I have already done 70 percent of what I would have done. However, given the way our lives are, it clearly does not work that way. For all you know I might even come up with a grand unified theory of physics that works at both the super large and super quantum scales. Can that really happen? Extremely unlikely but not altogether inconceivable.
That’s my point. We don’t know what next. Yet again a bigger strand of grey hair has fallen on my keyboard, this time specifically on the Shift key, which I will clear as soon as I finish this sentence.
