Whatever may happen to you, it was prepared for you from all
eternity; and the implication of causes was from eternity spinning the thread
of your being, and of that which is incidental to it.
—Marcus
Aurelius, Meditations, Book 10.5 (tr
Long)
I must always
be careful not to put the cart before the horse. Simply because I may prefer
something, will not not make it true, and simply because it may be convenient
for my desires at the moment, will not make it right.
The danger is
that I might begin with a conclusion, and then concoct an imaginary argument to
justify it; I will start with what I want, and confuse it with what I need. I ought
to remember that reasoning is quite different from rationalizing.
There have been
times when I have felt more comfortable living in a world of inherent order and
purpose, and there are times when I have longed for a world of aimless chance.
This comes from my mood, however, and not from any sort of wisdom; it describes
my passions, loosed from my understanding.
Even as my
feelings will change, I struggle to maintain a sense of reason, and over many
years of grappling with the way things work, I cannot bring myself to embrace
the primacy of chaos and disorder.
This is
because, in my mind, the very first principles of logic, of identity, of non-contradiction,
and of the excluded middle, demand that something is what it is, that it cannot
be its opposite, and that it either is or it isn’t. To claim otherwise is to
argue for what is literally impossible. The necessity of causality, that every
effect requires a cause, and that something cannot come from nothing, follows
from these principles.
If it has
happened, it has happened for a reason. If there is reason within the parts,
there is also reason within the whole. I face these facts in the big picture,
knowing that there is the ultimate rule of Providence, and I face these facts
in the small picture, knowing that nothing of daily life occurs in vain.
I see things
that seem random, but that is only in my limited perception, because I am not
fully able to discern the causes right then and there. As the days pass on and on, and as I get
closer to my own end, I am still acutely aware that there are much greater
ends.
My own freedom,
or that of any other rational creature, is not separate from that design, but
already included within that design, for the agency of each aspect participates
in the agency of all that is.
Each thread is spun
as a part of the greater weave, and there is no weave without the weaver. It
may not always be what I like, though it is my task to find a harmony between
what I like and what must be.
Written in 1/2009
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