The universe owes no favors / 25 (6.24.23)

A major facet of modern day optimism sprouts from this idea that if you've experienced a certain number of bad events in your life – heartbreak, death, famine, injury, poverty, war – that the universe will sometimes repay you in a form of positive karmic retribution. In other words, you will spend equal amounts of your life hurting as you will happy as a form of preordained balance that is believed to be at the core of this world. This would not, however, explain how five year olds get fatal leukemia or why certain innocent civilians are the victims of war crimes. (This is also essentially why I have trouble believing in “God”). This also does not account for the phenomenon of compounding in which more than one traumatic event being together also amplifies the power of them individually. They are stronger – and more devastating – when together.

I have come to the conclusion that the universe owes no favors. If you haven't had good luck with something, you might continue to have bad luck. You could be let down 12 times over and some more after that, over the same thing. The key is to not imagine the next time will be better. I don't mean this in a pessimistic way, but as if to free the idea that the universe is controllable and could have the power to honor things such as balance and morality. This in itself isn't hopeless or a doomed thing because what isn't controlled can also be exceptional and completely enrapture you in the best kind of surprise. It does cause a rather uncomfortable shift in the idea of security, one that I know I have always clung on to instead of sitting in what I don't know. But because there's no security in what isn't known or predetermined, it doesn't matter whether it's going to be good or bad. Up until the moment something happens, we don't know either way, and there's no betting that it will reliably swing positively or negatively.

It's hard when we get attached so naturally as human beings. Attachment, whether superficial or deeply developed, really is the source of suffering (or as Deepak Chopra puts it, suffering is pain you hold on to). I have always admired this stance of Buddhism because I think it's one of the hardest pillars of Buddhism to actualize. Humans are biologically engineered to form bonds and connect with other human beings, other items, passions, and let them make our hearts swell – the kinds of things or people that give us a reason to exist, give us motivation, drive, and purpose. We have an entire hormone that sets off dedicated to that feeling alone. No wonder we get so scared if that source of connection and happiness is cut off suddenly by the wild cards of the universe.

It's what we do after that initial scare that matters. And it's not to say we don't let ourselves feel, but it is to say that the web of experiences we build means there is always room to carve out another unforeseen avenue along the web. Keep building the web, searching for the new experience, the door we previously turned our backs on, the challenge we said we would never be up for. We can seek out the probability of the universe turning us on to new experiences – that much we can control, even if it doesn't guarantee the experience be a favorable or unfavorable outcome.

The universe can guarantee spontaneity, which I acknowledge is an oxymoron. You can guarantee the fact that nothing is totally guaranteed. But spontaneity is the spin of the wheel, the dealing of the card – at least you're in the game, building the web, carving out the avenue to at least see what's on the other side. You can also guarantee things that will always be there to bring you joy on a mundane level rather than a wildly impactful level, which is far less frequent of an occurrence. You can guarantee that the smell of the trees on a summer afternoon smells incredible, or that this song by this band makes you get goosebumps or cry. You know feeling warm water calms you down. You know the rustling of trees makes you feel present. That kind of thing.

When I asked my friend who turned 25 a couple months ago what she felt like she learned at the start of this age, she put finding the joy in the mundane and the every day kind of passing moments at the forefront. As things get more “serious” the older we get, we inevitably need to instill more time for fun and play that we knew so well as children. There's still an inner child that crawls in to a corner and buries their head in their legs in shame when we get a job rejection, a creative curtailing, a financial hit, whatever it may be. And that child does not deserve to be banished to the corner forever. We have to coax them out to run around on the playground and laugh with their buddies. That's the quintessential image of joy for children, and we need to find our adult equivalent for fear we will become too despondent for our own good.

It certainly doesn't come naturally to me to do this. Adulthood can make you hard like a rock, particularly once you reach this age in which you're not really a “young adult” anymore. You're just a full on adult. I believed for many years that I can somehow control the universe by how much I obsessed over a decision, or because I dealt with enough hardship so things must inevitably start turning around, etc. But of course, the universe owes no favors, and that lead me to loss adverse pessimism. I would mentally prepare for the worst case scenario at all times in that the best case scenario actually happening never registered like a reward or something I could be truly mentally present for. We are always one step removed, particularly from the impact of pain, and yet it has the consequence of also being one step removed from sitting with sheer joy.

It's not about preparing for the worst or the best when it's always a gamble, and there's no level of intuition that can hint you in the right direction. The universe may be able to implement balance in aspects of nature - the sun rises and sets, the birth and death of all living things – but it has no preordained ethical code. It has no consciousness. The fun has to be found, again, in the pure exploratory nature of human experience. One experience causes one result that transforms your life in some way, and based on that, you compound a new experience that creates the fundamental web of your life. One choice leads to another, and over time, it all becomes you. There is a process to really fall in love with here. The unknown becomes known. This is what kids do every day as they grow up, and yet it's always approached with excitement that gets gradually lost over the years. But we can find it again if we try.

Here's one code I started to really live by. Tap in to you, full on, no regrets. Be honest with style and experimentation as a way to play with the unknown and not try to beat its outcome to the punch. I mean this both superficially, as in with your look or style, as well as with the passions you wish to pursue. Who cares if somebody doesn't like it, if it isn't professional, if it isn't immediately understood? It's you. And the truth is that we're too old to give ourselves another reason to care so much about every little choice. We have enough to worry about when it comes to taxes, bills, healthcare, perhaps childcare, climate change, voting for political offices, you name it. One thing I've noticed from my friends in their 30s is that they do not protest who they truly are and have become, whether or not it's what they imagined for themselves in this lifetime. And because of that, they live with a resounding self acceptance that conjures up an assured sense of confidence. I am just starting to arrive at this mentality of not running away from who I really am just because there are folks who want to change it or give me a reason to think it isn't acceptable just how it is, today, in this moment.

Dye your hair blue. Tattoo your whole body if you want it for yourself. Go out with your close friends on the worst day of the week when you all just want to stay home and have to be up at 7am the next day. Fly across the country to see somebody you love, even if it doesn't end up working out in the future. Write that orchestral piece. We cannot guarantee those favorable outcomes, the idea that our vulnerability will not suddenly become exposed. We cannot guarantee that the universe will not spin like a top and land on the side of fate that nobody could have seen coming. So if it happens, you could say you at least did everything you wanted to and could do.

I always think about how I had an awful time at my first middle school, and because my older brother was auditioning for performing arts high schools, that I could enter one with a middle school program as well to formally study music at a new school in a new city with new friends. My friend recommended I bring a glockenspiel to my drum audition. It was beyond terrifying at 12 years old to make this change. But this single choice is also the reason I got introduced to the vibraphone, which has shaped the course of my entire life. I merely drew a new thread on the web, and it exploded ten fold in to the fabric of my life. And it can happen to anyone.

The universe owes no favors. Rather than it being a source of fear and inhibition, use it to spark the present moment for any kind of opportunity to forge the intricate, solely unique web that is you and your experiences to come. It can lead you to fear, but it can also just as easily guide you out of it. The guarantee is the power of choice and exploration. We hold the hand of that inner child in the sandbox, and we close our eyes and smell the grass after a fresh rain. And maybe somewhere along the way, we look up to find the world around us has completely changed, for better or for worse. The only thing that matters - right here, right now, with every advent of age - is holding that hand, committing oneself to the inertia of newness at every corner, the subtly familiar, and wielding the vulnerability that cuts us raw as the same kind that builds the very essence of our character.