Losing Grip

This isn't the blog post I had in mind, I can tell you that already. I'm not up to the rigors of dissecting anyone else's philosophical arguments tonight. No, rather I've been derailed, perhaps temporarily, by the likes of Leonard Cohen and this theme of slipping into the masterpiece. Letting go, yes, not of control but of the illusion of ever having any. I get it, I do, the argument against ultimate free will, and I believe it. That was a bit of a sudden shift in thinking, but not at all the dreaded trainwreck I might have thought it would be. I'll go on choosing which earrings to wear, what to eat for dinner, how to respond to others around me, living my life as if it's real. The freedom in recognizing that I do not have ultimate control is not the freedom I expected, but I'm getting a glimpse of it as the kind of freedom that's actually available to human beings.

I always feel that facts that are inconvenient for certain theories should be faced straight-on rather than be neglected.    Frans de Waal in A Very Bad Wizard.

 But as I said, my mental powers are at ebb tide at the moment. This has been a full week of early morning yoga practices, loaded days teaching school, and evenings spent in class, teaching yoga, or collapsing on the couch with my family and calling it quality time. Intellectual musings go on the back burner. For now I'll sink into Leonard's liquid lyrics and golden voice.