Welcome. Let’s begin with a Meditation Moment: First calm yourself…B r e a t h e. In. Out. Slowly now. Slowly. Hear the air. Second, Picture yourself in the center of where you are, sitting, standing, staring at a computer screen or smart device. View whatever surrounds you. Sweep vertically; sweep horizontally. Front, side, back, side, front, swivel that desk chair 360 degrees to take in all panoramically by the camera of your brain. This is your HERE. This is your NOW. Right now you are floating on a calm river. Floating.
But what’s to come? Where will you be an hour hence? And, since even a calm river moves, will you allow it to carry you where gravity takes it? Will you defiantly exhibit your free by turning upstream whenever you pass the unexpected confluences of tributary waters and cataracts or encounter tight meanders where you might ground on point bar deposits?
What kind of mediation is this? Who profits from speculation about the future that cannot be known, tomorrow’s downstream white water or chaotic seas churning today’s calm waters. What kind of meditation guru am I to ask where you will be? Shouldn’t I help you float in the Eternal Present and not ask you to pilot your ship through the turbulence of storms and rapids you cannot truly know until you encounter them? Doesn’t speculation about the future engender the opposite of what meditation is supposed to do?
___
You know how some people—theoretical physicists and wannabe theoretical physicists—go on and on about multiple universes, parallel worlds, and alternate realities? Well, maybe they are onto something about multiple universes, but even if their arguments are valid, at least, mathematically valid, I still don’t know whether I have some doppelgänger writing blogs that are antithetical to those I have posted on this website. Those other Donalds out there will always be only as real as conjecture. If I exist as doppelgängers in alternate worlds, then even in the deepest meditation, I cannot fully know my NOW. I might fall short by 10 to the minus 600+ Donalds. So, if I’m bound to this universe and no other, does that mean I live a predestined life?
Barring a fully deterministic universe, all of us seem to have choices as we progress toward our future. Our NOWs lead to personal tomorrows. At each moment, you and I do something that leads to something else but not to all possible “something elses.” Of course, there is nothing profound in that statement, and there are many ways to state it. We could argue, for example, that every NOW imposes a limitation on the future because, as Robert Frost writes in his “The Road Not Taken, once we choose, we’ll never be able to re-choose. And thus, the lands and waters we travel today determine the lands and waters we will travel. Free will means that the world might not be fully deterministic, but even if we accept free will, we have to acknowledge that personal determinism is a reality: The Present initiates the Future. If there are “many worlds,” we can know only one, and that is the one we determine by what we do in each NOW. Your future is the probable one, not the merely possible one, not the many possible futures.
I suppose it was a conjunction of events I watched from my room in the Westin in Savannah that got me to thinking about the relationship between NOW and future. Outside the large windows that afforded me a view that distracted me from my laptop, a wedding party was gathering under partly sunny (pessimists say “partly cloudy”) skies on a mid-October Saturday morning. Framed by an arch of flowers under which they stood (lower right in photo), a bride and groom, their backs to the wide river, were absorbed by their NOW. They achieved that goal of meditation; nothing outside of the NOW mattered. The well dressed onlookers sat in white folding chairs facing the couple, and like me, the attendees could see the river and across the river the busy touristy River Street.
And then, astonishingly quietly from my perspective behind the room's windows, I saw a moderate-size and half empty container ship sail by, carrying its load of unknowns concealed in those metal boxes, one possibly holding something I might have ordered on Amazon. The largest of these vessels can carry as many as 20 thousand 20-foot containers, but even this half empty moderate-size container ship was large enough to block the view of River Street. The backdrop of this couple’s wedding became for a few minutes not their romantic history, not their flowered arch and attendant wedding party, but a mass of metal coming from who knows where to head upstream into port. Could there be a more analog-rich setting?
1. Every couple enters that commitment with matters unknown. Each of us enters into any long-term relationship with a personal history that determines our present and our future. In marriages, young couples are constantly receiving new containers in their port of shared experience. Essentially, “I didn’t know that about you” lies in many to-be-opened containers. In the first years of any marriage, the container ships ceaselessly arrive, every present moment serving as a port for offloading a new container to open. 2. Container ships sail both into and out of ports. Their destinations of sea-bound ships are unknown to those along the riverside like the attendees at the wedding. Ships that leave port carry their cargo down the Savannah River as all of us carry our history on the river of time that discharges into a wide sea of possibilities. The contents of their thousands of container boxes are like the memories locked into our neurons, some to be revealed in the NOW whereas others to be revealed in some future port. And some, for good or bad, will be lost on a stormy sea, containers forgotten and never to be opened.
3. Even the pilot standing in the pilot house about eight floors above the main deck cannot know all the contents he carries. He might have the ship’s manifest, but in steering a thousand-foot vessel, he has no time to read it. In any relationship, members ask their partners to carry their unopened containers toward some distant port. All relationships carry such cargo; all partners discover the contents of some containers only after they arrive in port.
4, Seeing the stacks of containers before the pilot house, those along the river might ask, “How could the pilot know where the tip of the bow lies from such a vantage point? How can the pilot navigate the river’s meanders? The containers are stacked in columns like tall buildings.” As is the pattern on the Savannah River, tugboats accompany the ships, serving as a safety against a disaster and a possible aid in navigating meanders, such as the one just downstream from Savannah’s Talmadge Memorial Bridge.
5. For me, seeing the tugs assist the container ships opened my brain’s neuronic containers, immediately reviving memories of Little Toot, the fictional personified tugboat whose story was written by Hardie Gramatky. As a toddler, I made my mother read that book over and over at bedtime. She told me later that I had memorized every line—now lost in some corner of my hippocampus—of the tale, allowing me say the lines as she read them. Gramatky begins his story with a playful Little Toot and ends it as a tale of maturation and salvation (no spoiler alert needed). At the beginning of the story, Little Toot is preoccupied with the present, ironically sailing in figure eights, lemniscates, the symbol for infinity, on the ever-moving water. By the end of the tale, Little Toot becomes guide and savior handling the concerns of the present and preventing a disastrous future. Every tug on the Savannah River plays the role of Little Toot.
6. The wedding couple that day began their voyage downriver toward a sea of unknowns. Would they weather the storms they would, as all of us must, encounter? Would the containers of their past experiences be sufficient to help them through rough seas together? Would the new containers of shared experiences help them survive rough times together?
7. Do the containers of experiences the couple loads onto their mutual ship determine their destination? Will one or both steer the ship? Will either be able to see the bow from a pilot house with all those containers stacked before them?
8. Each ship is destined to sail in a universe packed with possibilities, but each ship is destined to arrive in ports predetermined by what it carries. Into what ports will the young couple sail? That they might have doppelgängers on similar ships sailing through other universes is irrelevant. What is relevant is the pre-loaded cargo they carry and the containers they load before they sail on each voyage. And yes, they will have more than one voyage. Time’s river like the Savannah keeps flowing with ships arriving and ships departing, both the Heraclitean river and the cargo changing. Container ships keep sailing into and out of port, offloading, loading, offloading, and loading.
In the few minutes you spent reading this, you have been in port and you have set a probable destination, and in loading another container in this port, you turn your present second by second into your next present. Doppelgängers and their ships take on different cargo and sail to different ports. If other universes are similar in any way, however, it’s in time’s arrow, the present always moving toward the unknown and turning possibilities into probabilities, and then ultimately into present and past realities. Your ship sails on the the rivers and seas of what was and is. You and I are both container ships. We do pilot to specific ports, but not through waters unthreatened by storms. And when we share piloting with another, we carry containers of unknown contents. And like the pilot stationed high in the pilot house, we can't fully view of the bow because stacks of intervening containers tower before us. We set our eyes on the water at some distance in front of the bow, hoping no sudden change occurs to the conditions we believe we preview. If we are fortunate, a tug, a guide, helps us whenever we navigate into and out of harbors and along narrow channels. Each ship sets sail from a port with pre-loaded cargo. For the wedding couple on that day in Savannah, the wedding itself was a port from which the couple will sail to other ports, each destination chosen on the basis of what the ship carries or intends to transport. And just as the pilot steers into water beyond the bow, so the couple steers with an eye on some predetermined port, a future they see off in the distance while sailing through the immediate waters obscured by what they carry. And as they sail, they come to realize that the voyage they vowed has to be altered to meet the conditions immediately before their bow.
But what’s to come? Where will you be an hour hence? And, since even a calm river moves, will you allow it to carry you where gravity takes it? Will you defiantly exhibit your free by turning upstream whenever you pass the unexpected confluences of tributary waters and cataracts or encounter tight meanders where you might ground on point bar deposits?
What kind of mediation is this? Who profits from speculation about the future that cannot be known, tomorrow’s downstream white water or chaotic seas churning today’s calm waters. What kind of meditation guru am I to ask where you will be? Shouldn’t I help you float in the Eternal Present and not ask you to pilot your ship through the turbulence of storms and rapids you cannot truly know until you encounter them? Doesn’t speculation about the future engender the opposite of what meditation is supposed to do?
___
You know how some people—theoretical physicists and wannabe theoretical physicists—go on and on about multiple universes, parallel worlds, and alternate realities? Well, maybe they are onto something about multiple universes, but even if their arguments are valid, at least, mathematically valid, I still don’t know whether I have some doppelgänger writing blogs that are antithetical to those I have posted on this website. Those other Donalds out there will always be only as real as conjecture. If I exist as doppelgängers in alternate worlds, then even in the deepest meditation, I cannot fully know my NOW. I might fall short by 10 to the minus 600+ Donalds. So, if I’m bound to this universe and no other, does that mean I live a predestined life?
Barring a fully deterministic universe, all of us seem to have choices as we progress toward our future. Our NOWs lead to personal tomorrows. At each moment, you and I do something that leads to something else but not to all possible “something elses.” Of course, there is nothing profound in that statement, and there are many ways to state it. We could argue, for example, that every NOW imposes a limitation on the future because, as Robert Frost writes in his “The Road Not Taken, once we choose, we’ll never be able to re-choose. And thus, the lands and waters we travel today determine the lands and waters we will travel. Free will means that the world might not be fully deterministic, but even if we accept free will, we have to acknowledge that personal determinism is a reality: The Present initiates the Future. If there are “many worlds,” we can know only one, and that is the one we determine by what we do in each NOW. Your future is the probable one, not the merely possible one, not the many possible futures.
I suppose it was a conjunction of events I watched from my room in the Westin in Savannah that got me to thinking about the relationship between NOW and future. Outside the large windows that afforded me a view that distracted me from my laptop, a wedding party was gathering under partly sunny (pessimists say “partly cloudy”) skies on a mid-October Saturday morning. Framed by an arch of flowers under which they stood (lower right in photo), a bride and groom, their backs to the wide river, were absorbed by their NOW. They achieved that goal of meditation; nothing outside of the NOW mattered. The well dressed onlookers sat in white folding chairs facing the couple, and like me, the attendees could see the river and across the river the busy touristy River Street.
And then, astonishingly quietly from my perspective behind the room's windows, I saw a moderate-size and half empty container ship sail by, carrying its load of unknowns concealed in those metal boxes, one possibly holding something I might have ordered on Amazon. The largest of these vessels can carry as many as 20 thousand 20-foot containers, but even this half empty moderate-size container ship was large enough to block the view of River Street. The backdrop of this couple’s wedding became for a few minutes not their romantic history, not their flowered arch and attendant wedding party, but a mass of metal coming from who knows where to head upstream into port. Could there be a more analog-rich setting?
1. Every couple enters that commitment with matters unknown. Each of us enters into any long-term relationship with a personal history that determines our present and our future. In marriages, young couples are constantly receiving new containers in their port of shared experience. Essentially, “I didn’t know that about you” lies in many to-be-opened containers. In the first years of any marriage, the container ships ceaselessly arrive, every present moment serving as a port for offloading a new container to open. 2. Container ships sail both into and out of ports. Their destinations of sea-bound ships are unknown to those along the riverside like the attendees at the wedding. Ships that leave port carry their cargo down the Savannah River as all of us carry our history on the river of time that discharges into a wide sea of possibilities. The contents of their thousands of container boxes are like the memories locked into our neurons, some to be revealed in the NOW whereas others to be revealed in some future port. And some, for good or bad, will be lost on a stormy sea, containers forgotten and never to be opened.
3. Even the pilot standing in the pilot house about eight floors above the main deck cannot know all the contents he carries. He might have the ship’s manifest, but in steering a thousand-foot vessel, he has no time to read it. In any relationship, members ask their partners to carry their unopened containers toward some distant port. All relationships carry such cargo; all partners discover the contents of some containers only after they arrive in port.
4, Seeing the stacks of containers before the pilot house, those along the river might ask, “How could the pilot know where the tip of the bow lies from such a vantage point? How can the pilot navigate the river’s meanders? The containers are stacked in columns like tall buildings.” As is the pattern on the Savannah River, tugboats accompany the ships, serving as a safety against a disaster and a possible aid in navigating meanders, such as the one just downstream from Savannah’s Talmadge Memorial Bridge.
5. For me, seeing the tugs assist the container ships opened my brain’s neuronic containers, immediately reviving memories of Little Toot, the fictional personified tugboat whose story was written by Hardie Gramatky. As a toddler, I made my mother read that book over and over at bedtime. She told me later that I had memorized every line—now lost in some corner of my hippocampus—of the tale, allowing me say the lines as she read them. Gramatky begins his story with a playful Little Toot and ends it as a tale of maturation and salvation (no spoiler alert needed). At the beginning of the story, Little Toot is preoccupied with the present, ironically sailing in figure eights, lemniscates, the symbol for infinity, on the ever-moving water. By the end of the tale, Little Toot becomes guide and savior handling the concerns of the present and preventing a disastrous future. Every tug on the Savannah River plays the role of Little Toot.
6. The wedding couple that day began their voyage downriver toward a sea of unknowns. Would they weather the storms they would, as all of us must, encounter? Would the containers of their past experiences be sufficient to help them through rough seas together? Would the new containers of shared experiences help them survive rough times together?
7. Do the containers of experiences the couple loads onto their mutual ship determine their destination? Will one or both steer the ship? Will either be able to see the bow from a pilot house with all those containers stacked before them?
8. Each ship is destined to sail in a universe packed with possibilities, but each ship is destined to arrive in ports predetermined by what it carries. Into what ports will the young couple sail? That they might have doppelgängers on similar ships sailing through other universes is irrelevant. What is relevant is the pre-loaded cargo they carry and the containers they load before they sail on each voyage. And yes, they will have more than one voyage. Time’s river like the Savannah keeps flowing with ships arriving and ships departing, both the Heraclitean river and the cargo changing. Container ships keep sailing into and out of port, offloading, loading, offloading, and loading.
In the few minutes you spent reading this, you have been in port and you have set a probable destination, and in loading another container in this port, you turn your present second by second into your next present. Doppelgängers and their ships take on different cargo and sail to different ports. If other universes are similar in any way, however, it’s in time’s arrow, the present always moving toward the unknown and turning possibilities into probabilities, and then ultimately into present and past realities. Your ship sails on the the rivers and seas of what was and is. You and I are both container ships. We do pilot to specific ports, but not through waters unthreatened by storms. And when we share piloting with another, we carry containers of unknown contents. And like the pilot stationed high in the pilot house, we can't fully view of the bow because stacks of intervening containers tower before us. We set our eyes on the water at some distance in front of the bow, hoping no sudden change occurs to the conditions we believe we preview. If we are fortunate, a tug, a guide, helps us whenever we navigate into and out of harbors and along narrow channels. Each ship sets sail from a port with pre-loaded cargo. For the wedding couple on that day in Savannah, the wedding itself was a port from which the couple will sail to other ports, each destination chosen on the basis of what the ship carries or intends to transport. And just as the pilot steers into water beyond the bow, so the couple steers with an eye on some predetermined port, a future they see off in the distance while sailing through the immediate waters obscured by what they carry. And as they sail, they come to realize that the voyage they vowed has to be altered to meet the conditions immediately before their bow.
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