The little jellyfish swim gracefully behind the glass of their aquarium home. As they move from here to there
it occurs to me that many of them aren’t swimming at all. They’re floating. Moved not by themselves but by the current inside the tank.
I wonder how much of life does the same.
Do we move by decision, or are we propelled by currents more often than we notice.
On June 28, 1914, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in faraway Austria-Hungary; a seemingly far away event unconnected to anything else. One thing led to another, then another - then to even more another’s.
The combined another’s finally ended in the world’s first World War. Was this the result of national leaders making rational decisions, or were their decisions driven
by currents they didn’t recognize.
Ralph Waldo Emerson famously said, “Events are in the saddle, and ride mankind”. Emerson’s “Events” might also be thought of as currents, or more literally, as current events.
If great decisions are pushed as much by currents as
by decision, so too are the minor currents of conversational flow. There is a worthy diner-conversation sample of this written by Thomas Mann in his short-story, The Blood
of the Walsungs.
“The conversation tacked to and fro. They argued
the matter, They analyzed it with great ingenuity, they gave examples; they talked nineteen to the dozen, attacked each other with steely and abstract dialectic, and got no little heated.
Marit had introduced a philosophical distinction between actual and causal principal. Kunz told her, with his nose in the air, that causal principal was a pleonasm. Marit, in some annoyance, insisted upon her own terminology.
Herr Aarenhold straightened himself, with a bit of bread between thumb and forefinger, and prepared to elucidate the whole matter”.
Conversation whether high-brow or low tends to flow in erratic patterns. We imagine ourselves talking to each other, only to find ourselves talking around each other. Everyone has a different understanding of what’s being discussed.
Sentences are left unfinished, New topics
are randomly inserted. Reason is washed away by the swirl of conversation’s capricious current. The fact that the ship has drifted off-course is barely noticed by the speakers.
I once had an audio-recorded conversation transcribed to paper. What went unnoticed in speech was glaringly obvious in the written transcript.
Guessing what the original intention might have been was the only way to make sense of what was said.
Great events, conversation, and much else, drift where they will in unnoticed currents that move us to actions and places we never planned.
What’s true for us is true for the world in general.
Ocean currents mysteriously shift their patterns despite our knowledge of the laws of physics that move them. Weather patterns mysteriously do the same.
The problem is too many laws of physics interacting at the same time. We can’t know further than days or months where the currents are going - and we don’t know where the currents are taking us.
Did Joe always intend to marry Sue, or did currents beyond their understanding bring them together to make
it possible?. Did the fisherman plan on catching that particular trout, or did the current of the stream carry it
to his hook?
We do make decisions, but our decisions, our Free Will, is limited by circumstances; Corcumstances that mysterious currents seem to float to us serendipitously.
Another possibility is that those seemingly serendipitous currents are actually planed by an intelligent designer hidden beyond the dimness of our Earthly veil.
It’s an age-old question.
What you decide about that question will affect all you do thereafter.