Choices, Chance and Circumstances

The type of time that I believe I live my life by is Stellar Time. Entropic Time, as life does seem to be full of random events, I do not believe that there is no purpose or meaning to life. We are all here for a reason. This is an innate intuitive feeling that I have. I strongly believe that it is illogical to feel that our lives serve no meaning. I believe our lives serve great meaning in regard to the big picture as well as to the individuals we share our lives with. As Teleological Time may be of a realistic type of time, it does not seem fitting for me because I do not believe my life unfolds in a streamlined manner and goes from point A to point B. Yes, I have goals set for myself, and yes there are certain steps I must take in order to achieve these goals, but life tends to be more fluid and these steps seem to always shift and change, and my goals, as they are important, there are many other important aspects of my life. Stellar time is one that I feel best resembles the way the time in my life exists because I often find many thoughts or experiences in my life to intermingle with each other and I find that my thoughts and experiences intermingle with the thoughts and experiences of other people. The many random things that we experience affect us as a whole. These collections of experiences make us who we are. Without this intermingling, we would be different people than we are. If our thought process kept each and every experience separate and individual in our minds, with no overlapping or connections, our lives and the world would not make much sense to us. Without others, our experiences would be pathetically minimal. It is experiencing those around us, who each have their own experiences, that enrich our lives. On a typical day, I have my set responsibilities that I must address, whether it be work or school. Outside of these two structured parts of my life, anything is game. But, at the same time, when considering my structured responsibilities of work and school, as they will dependably be there for me to be responsible for, the experiences that I have when at work and school are never repeated. I always have something new to take with me, which becomes a new part of me. These experiences are contributed by those around me. And I contribute to the experiences of others. And these experiences help to make us the people we are. When considering my experience with Twitter, I saw this play out. I saw how, for instance, the occurrence of the springtime morning snowfall affected us or did not affect us. Where some of us wanted to stay home but could not, and others wanted to stay home and did, there were also people that morning who did not even realize it was snowing as they slept through it. Another classmate mentioned how she feels guilty when she eats late after school. I too feel this same way sometimes, and as I know just from logic that others must feel this way, it was assuring to hear from someone that she too goes through this. There were quite a few classmates who have a rough time working as they are students. This is also something that I can relate to as some days it can be a great physical and mental struggle to keep going with this lifestyle, but we all keep going because we know the importance of an education and we know that we will not be students for very long, that we have to just go with the motions and school will be out of our life's equation and we will just have to go to work. As Stellar Time moves on, we collect our experiences, we introduce our experiences to other people, they introduce their experiences to us, and we all grow from these inner and exterior interactions. And Twitter seems to be a new and different platform in which these connections and overlapping of experiences between people can occur.

The author mentioned that the Garden of Forking Paths tried to explain that “time is not uniform and absolute,” time is more fluid and too are our lives because there are numerous possible alternatives. The choice we make is not the only choice available to us. Perhaps what he also meant is that if we all experienced different circumstances, if we all chose one of the other options available, we would be different because of this, and we would contribute to the lives of others differently, helping to make circumstances for them different as well. The author explained how the story plays with “multiple existing realities” and with the “end and beginning, real and unreal, cause and effect…to describe this world of multiple possibilities,” that our lives could have unfolded in numerous different ways, but unfolded in this way due to choice, chance and circumstance. The word “labyrinth” is used frequently in the hypertext to explain the story, as our lives are of a labyrinth and equally so are our minds. Our lives are fluid with no set structure, we have choices we must make, we make the choices, and our lives move on to the next set of choices that are open and available to us due to the previous choices that we made, and so on.