I will not decide what I can instead discover

I’m on holiday in Arrowtown, Central Otago. My family has lived here for generations and I am always grateful to feel the land welcome me, even if this is the first time I’ve had words for that experience.

I've been thinking a lot since I arrived about my cousin Ferg, who died in 2021. I’ve been talking to him a bit, sharing memories, thanking him for various kindnesses. At seven years my senior, Ferg seemed like an adult to me when I was a kid, and I treasured the things he sent me from his travels: a takahē feather from Fiordland, a dark irregular stone dredged up from the Mariana Trench which is probably tens of millions years old and, even now, smells of the sea.

(I’ve possibly even been feeling his feelings. I have at times in the last few days felt sadness moving through me that doesn’t seem to belong to me, and I’ve wondered if maybe it’s his. No way of knowing.)

There's an informal memorial to Ferg on top of Skytop, the family name for Feehly Hill, a steep but readily climbable rocky outcrop overlooking the town. I think his ashes were scattered up there. This morning I really wanted to hike up there and be with him. It’s hard going in places but it only takes about half an hour. It felt like an urgent want, a tug at my heart.

But at the same time, an inner voice was cautioning: You’ve just got over strep throat. You felt better yesterday and went for a run, sure, but you must have overdone it, because last night your throat was sore again, and you went to bed at 5pm feeling rotten and had night sweats. Your throat is still a little sore this morning, possibly not helped by the fact you got up at midnight and went outside to bathe in the starlight, you daft hippie. It would be the height of folly to exert yourself today. You need to rest and get better. You can go tomorrow if you feel well enough.

This all seemed very sensible, and I felt torn, fractured. It felt right somehow for me to make the climb, but also objectively unwise, and I didn’t know if I could rely on Spirit to give me a hall pass. Was the longing I felt a spiritual prompting, or just my own desire in drag? Would I, or would I not, cope with the exertion? Could I get away with it?

I doubted my sincerity, suspected my motives, and felt increasingly restless and confused as I wrestled with it. I prayed for guidance, and none came.

It took me a good (bad) two hours of increasingly self-pitying graceless floundering before I had the incredibly obvious realisation, halfway through melancholically washing the dishes, that I didn’t have to decide now. I could instead head out and start the climb, take it slow, pay attention both to my body and my conscience, and turn around and come back down if I realised I needed to.

It felt like a eureka moment, and I said out loud to the soapy mug in my hand, “I really should stop trying to decide things that I need to discover instead”.

And then I added, “Woah”, because I realised I’d just said a mouthful. That one sentence tied together in a sweet bouquet a range of conceptual flowers I’d picked lately – about free will, writing, cognitive biases, creativity, opportunities and identity – without realising they would work together.

Let's bury our noses in that bouquet.

I used to think I wrote as a way of figuring things out. That I was making meaning of my experience through analysing it. Very much an E. M. Forster-style "How can I know what I think until I see what I say?" girl.

Then at some stage, I think fairly recently, I came to see that writing is, for me, my way of allowing my brain to comprehend, record and share what my body and heart and soul already know. It is not a process of making meaning, but of expressing it in a different and more conveniently communicative medium.

And over the last few months I’ve come to see that the meaning I am expressing about myself here is increasingly in the form of discoveries or realisations, not decisions. What generally happens with these blog posts is that I become aware of a truth about myself, and then I try to describe it in words. It's creative, in a sense, but not generative; the generative bit has already occurred. Even when I'm describing a resolution, it's a resolution I've become aware of as already being true for me.

The distinction between this descriptive activity and the constitutive one of "determining things about myself through storytelling" is, like the distinction between journalism and fiction, both wafer-thin and galaxies wide. And increasingly I feel like getting a handle on it is of vital importance to my ability to experience the full potential of my existence.

Here’s the thing. In our culture, the idea that we as individuals “write our own stories” is considered both natural and admirable. We’re exercising our intellects to master our fates and captain our souls all over the place; and if we’re not, we bloody well should be. Our job is not just to express but actually to create ourselves through cumulative cognitive and intellectual acts of deciding, goal-setting, planning and making-so, day by day. Embodying the central planner, dwelling in the deciding-mind, is the right and adult thing to do.

Now, I haven’t believed for a long time that any real choosing is going on in. I bit the bullet of hard determinism years ago; but even setting metaphysics aside, I know my brain is a well-meaning but disastrously under-informed and highly biased storyteller. It is hell-bent on protecting me from harm, including various irrational but deeply held subconscious fears, and so it constantly lies to me, massaging my motivations with enormously persuasive finesse.

This is normal behaviour for brains. We have to categorise and filter in order to make sense of the near-infinite stream of data we encounter all the time. And selective curation of our experience into a coherent narrative about ourselves and our lives can be very useful and empowering. Believing you’re the captain of your soul can get you out of some tight spots. Unless you’re permanently enlightened or invariably lucky, you almost certainly want to have motivated self-deception in your cognitive toolkit for emergencies.

But maybe you don’t want to put that same biased, filtering, selective, motivated deciding-mind in charge of telling you who you can be for the rest of your life, hey? Maybe you don’t want a fabulist calling the shots.

John Cleese famously spoke about the value in a creative process of being able to sit with the discomfort of uncertainty. Of resisting the instinctive urge to resolve the tension of "not knowing" by settling on an early idea, when the best idea may be yet to come. He argued that creative people make better managerial problem-solvers in part because they've had more practice at this.

I think there's an analogy here to how we manage our lives. Increasingly I feel that, when we make intellectual decisions about who we will be today, when we let our deciding-minds tell us stories about the future instead of waiting in an open and experimental frame of mind to see what happens, we cut short the wild and unpredictable creative journey of human expression.

So I wonder: If I try to resist making decisions about who or how I am, and instead just sit back.and invite my intellect to watch and listen, what might I learn about myself and the untapped possibilities of my life? Ram Dass talks about cultivating the Witness, the place at the calm centre from which we can observe with non-judgmental curiosity, clarity and compassion. What could my Witness tell me about the interesting doors I have unwittingly closed today because they didn't fit the story I told myself yesterday about how my life would go?

To quote Josh Schrei: “The next bit of the story has not in any way been written. The next breath is the great unknown.” I've already surprised myself a lot this year and to say it's been liberating is a striking understatement. Can I keep on surprising myself? Or, even better, can I step out of the habit of setting expectations and making predictions about my future behaviour, such that surprise is no longer applicable?

This afternoon I climbed Skytop. I took it slow. I asked myself often how I was feeling, and the answer was always that I was feeling good – all the way to the top.

I had it all to myself up there. I spoke to Ferg and I sang to the land, and I cried and cried and cried. I recorded a voice note that might become a poem. And I came back down an hour later feeling whole again.

I am not going to try to decide whether or not I’m getting sick again. I’ll know when I know, and it won't be my brain that gets the news first.

Postscript

I appreciate the irony of writing an analytical post that devoutly resolves to avoid devout analytical resolving. As Ram Dass cutely paraphrased Ramana Maharshi: When you clean up the outer temple to go into the inner temple, you don’t stop to read everything you’re going to throw away. (1) Or as another wise man, my driving instructor Sandy, said to me 20 years ago, “If you keep looking at things you’re trying not to hit, you’re more likely to hit them. We steer toward the thing we’re looking at. Keep your eyes on the gap.”

I've wanted here to embrace my unfolding dynamic experience, sure; but I've also wanted to capture in words my understanding and intention. I think I am being honest in saying that this intention is one I have noticed to be true for me, rather than one I have decided upon; I've done my best to keep my eyes on the gap.

Footnote

(1) What Maharshi actually said was: “Just as one who wants to throw away garbage has no need to analyze it and see what it is, so one who wants to know the Self has no need to count the number of categories or inquire into their characteristics. What he has to do is to reject altogether the categories that hide the Self. The world should be considered like a dream.” (From "Nān Yār?" | "Who am I?", compiled 1902.)