{ Header picture: Captured by Me at Sauraha, Chitwan dated around July, 2018 }
The audio version (podcast) of this writing(esaay?) can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEuf3JQAIAw
[After Watching The Movie Mr. Nobody]
This is one of the best movies I have ever watched in my whole life. To be honest, the movie was on my laptop for more than a year and I made a choice that I will watch this when I am actually “in the zone”. And just a few minutes back (maybe 10 minutes), I have completed the movie. Now, I am left with so many inexorable thoughts that I feel like jolting them down here in this blank canvas.
For me, movies are the “best” when they tend to reflect my personal life, the little nuances of choices I make and the struggles and happiness that come thereafter. This movie… Well… It covers the philosophies of free will and determinism. Right now I am totally intrigued by the fact that movie was able to put up this concept of inherent choices we make in our life, in much artistic way of story-telling. Time and again, as I watched the scenes warping between different timelines and spaces, they kept on knocking at my senses that LIFE is an amalgam of choices — some we have control over and some we don’t.
I remember one of my thought-whining posts I wrote a year ago (maybe), the time when I was feeling pretty much empty. Although I still feel that emptiness — pondering about life in a nutshell. I guess some of us have the choices and some don’t. There are certain things that we don’t actually have control over; partly because the influences the people and the society impart around us, and partly because we are circumscribed to this notion of influencing our own future. Our destiny. In a general sense, we can’t control (or manipulate) our past but what we can do is look eagerly to making life choices to build our future. That is in more ways a time travel, but the arrow of time (just a symbolic notion) is unidirectional. And if you think enough, you are just going with the flow. Choices, life goals and changes. These 3 are intertwined so deeply that create the notion of free will, but in fact, are mere things that you can’t have control over in more ways! Just think about it. You went to college, the supposedly-best in town. You tried studying. You got fed up. And then thought of quitting the shit! But then what made you to not quit that? Where you in total control of that? Or perhaps you were playing along in the flow of time to see for yourself if not quitting was the best bet you had! Maybe. Maybe, you had choices. But sometimes, that’s not even into the play. There are things that are inevitable, thus rendering the choices merely inanimate. In the movie, this was depicted by the fact that when Nemo met with his “love of life” after a long time, and when she gave her the phone number, Nemo was left with these digits on a piece of paper which inadvertently got wiped up by the sudden drop of water. See. Nemo had the choice to be in contact with his love sometime later, but couldn’t because of that sudden mishap. And he was rendered to wait (and be alone) for the rest of his life. Maybe that’s how most of our lives are. Well, not about love. But most of the things.
Coming back to three factors (I like to call them my personal trinity), change is inevitable. You make a choice for what? To change your own self, or to change the situations you are in? Changes are there even when you are not even thinking. You try meditation to get away from the facts and fictions of realities, or perhaps embracing the world around. But inevitably, you are under a metamorphosis of changing yourself. A little habit introduced into your daily life-stream. You make choices and thus introduce inherent changes. Now, these seem like a good bait for “free will” (which is a whole another topic/dimension in itself). But have you ever thought or reflected back on the choices and changes that have been elicited? Have you ever thought on why you left all the commotions around and went underground, unnoticed just to embrace the change you have become within? Have you ever thought on why you are still single or have failed miserably to “flow in love”? Maybe the choices you had made introduced the changes. But if you think enough, maybe. Maybe just enough of choices you didn’t actually have control over. And I think that’s when determinism comes in and which is subsumed by life goals. You plan to make your life meaningful, and thus try to engage in things that matter for you — the things that you feel satisfied with. I don’t know. Those supposedly-goals might just be your wishes that you dream of, which could be fulfilled unknowingly.
Well! That’s how the creation of life as a function of time itself might come in. “life = f(t)” sums up everything; people, society, nation, universe and all the events, choices, changes and above all, your self-aspiring philosophy of life. (this is meta).
Maybe life is all about these choices and changes, and being able to embrace them for greater good. :)