agency – What’s here now?

I’ve always found this time of year rather strange. I find myself surrounded by people both off and online looking back over the previous year and/ or looking ahead to the next.

I find myself doing neither. What’s done is done. Lessons will be learned or they won’t and what’s to come will come and the degree to which we have any conscious agency over any of it is (as I always boringly say) greatly overstated.

The only time that matters is now, the present moment – forever on the cusp of what’s gone and what’s unfolding. Neither memory nor imagination. An ever fluid liminal zone, ungraspable yet vitally and vividly apparent. Reality in the raw.

Nothings comes next, this is always it.

It comes as a great relief to realise that you could not have lived your life in any other way despite all the reasons and stories you tell yourself about how things could have been different.

They weren’t different because they weren’t.

The degree to which we think our conscious awareness has control and agency over our actions is greatly overstated.

Indeed I would go as far as to say what we think are choices and decisions are pure fantasy applied after the fact to instantiate a sense of a separate, autonomous entity of selfhood.

Make no mistake about this. We are are not doing life. Life is doing us.

— The myth of doership

We no more consciously know what we’re going to say or do next than we beat our heart, digest our food or grow our hair.