WHERE AM I?
This seems like an easy question, at least geographically. Your answer could be just your street address or your home town where your mailbox sits. But a friend that I had not talked to since PreCovid days recently asked me this question in a more philosophical mode. Finding an answer made me regroup a bit.
Where was I, my age-peer really wanted to know without spelling it out, in terms of my social re-engagement, personal creativity and involvement, and general late-life perspective—since our last long-ago conversation?
But the answer of WHERE. even just in the physical realm, gets way, WAY more complicated if you take it to the extreme. And of course I have.
Wringing out as much precision as possible in your answer can lead into an informative and expansive exercise. This diversion is suited for when one is forced indoors by March winds and blowing rain. And when that same soul is about to turn 74 any day now.
Without making too fine a point here, this ultra-precise answer is a solvable physics puzzle and visual exercise. As a much younger man, while sitting in the shade of a massive poplar in the Fortress of Solitude, I attempted to grasp this epic journey we all travel.
This ramble on whereness evolves in part out of my recent contact with some young people, just becoming who they hope to be. Where was I—what were my hopes when I was in my early twenties, just after the last Ice Age? It made me think, and thinking made me write. My apologies.
I was startled to see crystal clarity under that tree long ago that still is still moving. The nature of nature is movement, be it stone or stonefly. The very mountains are in motion toward the sea. Nothing is fixed.
I saw, in this lucid daydream, the movement of all the humanoid forms passing down this ravine and past my sit spot over ten thousand years--warriors, hunters, explorers, Civil War deserters. Over the eons, a lot of animal motion had stirred the cool air I was breathing down in that rocky gorge.
And over the course of my lifetime, I would have moved in my own circles, over spirographic paths along Earth's mineral integument of rock and soil, between home and school, work and home, and to beaches or mountaintops infrequently and briefly. Think Family Circus dotted tracks over a lifetime.
But just sitting motionless, leaning up against the smooth bole of that massive tulip poplar, my corporeal coordinates were changing every instant, whether I was aware of that motion or not.
And so, with no other place to be that day, I conjured up all the circles and arcs of motion that were carrying me through hundreds of millions of miles of space a year.
I accepted the notion that I was spinning on Earth's surface at fixed coordinates, a concept made easier to comprehend as the planet I was riding rotated me slowly into the lengthening shadows of early afternoon.
From that out-of-body vantage point, I saw me under the tree, one tiny speck on the spinning Earth as it revolved around the sun. The local galaxy (our Milky Way) that holds our solar system was both revolving and moving out, like every other celestial object, farther away from everything else. And in this pinwheel-in-a-storm gyration, I embodied a specific and factual, universal WHERE that only one soul in all of creation would ever travel. This was my very personal capital-T Trajectory. Yours is almost identical, but not quite.
But the WHERE that I am has also to do with the WHEN in the Arc of Time.
There have been four billion Earth years of possible moments when you or I could have been dropped on the scene. But our species is a late arrival, first on the scene just an eye-blink ago, and we're not exactly sure what we will become--or if we will persist.
We stand on the backs of giants. We arrived against all odds, threatened every couple of hundred million years by cataclysmic extinction. Our seed stock passed through one bottleneck, then another, to arrive and thrive in a temporary Holocene that marks the very tip of the TIME spiral. And here we are, each of us born into a lifetime of possibility in a world of chance and choice.
And it is with that grounding in both time and space that I sit here with my coffee this morning and consider the WHERE of my own life, past and future. Where: have I been. Where: am I going now? And what might choice and chance have to say about any course I claim as my own?
So HERE I am. This is my at-the-moment WHERE. How did I get here, and what possibilities lie ahead?
I found the "life path" doodle by Tim Urban helpful in thinking into (if not all the way through) this existential exercise.
Chance. Fate. Approach. Avoidance. Nature. Nurture. Genetics. The right choices. The wrong friends. The clarity. The bewilderment. Some pleasure. Some pain. The moving wheels of a million other lives whose trajectories nudged against mine at every moment. A butterfly flaps its wings, and...
What MOVES us towards one possible life path and away from another?
We might see ourselves at the exact center of a perfect cube that is our life path’s domain, in which the only dynamic point is the NOW. At every instant over threescore and ten-ish years, our course is altered, sometimes but not always realized, by vectors of influence. Each vector (teacher, friend, the bully in school) moves us with its own force and within an infinitiy of possible directions.
While we are not entirely at the wheel of our own fate, if we persist with a pulse, one of those green lines will become the road we are on.
I'd prefer that my next path be more intentional and less accidental. I have concluded I do not enjoy and am not content being flotsam.
And so, at the end of all these peregrinations ( and if you’ll forgive the mixed metaphors) I'm getting back on that horse of intention and agency, after being dragged by the stirrups over the course of covid's chaos and the civic-political-rational clusterplucking of purpose and distancing from ourselves that many of us have suffered during the past five years. The fog and disconnect started, for some, before covid.
And yet, still is still moving. Tempus is still fugiting. Doing nothing is a trajectory. If I have a heartbeat, I am moving--actively or passively--into the leading edge of Earth-time, riding a never-before-traveled arc through the cosmos, surfing the age-wave on a terminal green twig of NOW near the tip-end of my life path.
So WHERE am I?
It's complicated.
A couple of comments. First, I really like the Life Paths graphic. Ever since I began to think about such things, I’ve thought of time as a continuum. The Present is a dimensionless, ever-moving point and the Future is unknowable, except in broad outline. All we have is the Past, both our personal Past and the historical past of our species and of the planet. However imperfectly we know and understand the Past, each one of us is its creation. This is reason enough, in my opinion, to study history.
The other thought comes from a conversation I had a long time ago with a mutual acquaintance of ours. He opined that one can largely define where one is in life by (1) Who you’re living with, (2) Where you live, and (3) What you’re doing. I think there’s a lot of truth to that. Those three things pretty well determine the course of the squiggly line we have followed on the left side of the Life Path graphic. It all comes down to decisions, choices we’ve made, for good or ill. Some years ago, I “diagrammed” my life in terms of those decision points. It was very instructive.
Thanks, Fred, for writing and sharing this!
I really got the sensation of movement that your metaphors and graphics described. And I like chance and choice. Easy to remember. I am glad you are starting to make active choices once more.