On reconciliations

I was thinking, sitting on the john today, that part of being happy in life is reconciling the degree to which you are lucky, and the degree to which you have put in effort. We are all of us fortunate, in some degrees, and with the fortune of what we are given, what we may accomplish in a lifetime is then measured by the amount of effort that we exert. The question then, I suppose, becomes how much may be accomplished through sheer effort, given however much luck, seredipity, or fate intercedes in our lives. It seems a fairly simple equation, but the dynamics end up being incredibly complicated when measured over the course of even a few years, much less a lifetime.

For example, my being here in New York, I ascribe to my decision to try out for a role in "A Midsummer Night's Dream," some six years ago, in which I got the role of Theseus. However, I would never have even contemplated trying out for a role if a) I weren't a part of the Writing Minor's mailing list and b) we hadn't just seen "Much Ado About Nothing" a week earlier as a class field trip in my critical reading class. Of course, then it may be said that I certainly wouldn't have chosen to be a part of the mailing list if I hadn't developed a love and appreciation for writing back in the fifth grade. This, in turn, was actually the result of playing entirely too much Nintendo, and reading a stupid number of those "Worlds of Power" novelizations back in grade school. The actual catalyst for the writing, however, was a snowy Thanksgiving day, wherein I got the idea in my head to write my own "World of Power" book, based upon a video game (or several video games, rather), with a much maligned hero rather similar to me, adventuring in video games not covered by the Worlds of Power series. But then, I wouldn't have been playing Nintendo in the first place if my father hadn't been one of two people to place extremely highly in a regional English competition back in China, and who were elected to come to the US to study as a result. The progression continues, in an endless chain, back to that mysterious moment when a superdense molecule of matter decided it would become a universe.

Sounds rather like fate, doesn't it?

Then again, we hardly know, do we? We have never experienced the alternatives, so of course in a certain sense the progression of events seems to be locked into a rail. As Neil Gaiman puts it, and so eloquently, the Garden of Destiny forks many times, with each path opening up countless others, but at the end of your life you will turn back and see but a single path extending behind you.

Existing in a closed system, as we do, we can hardly extricate ourselves to observe the situation from a truly objective standpoint. It's Shroedinger's Cat on a cosmic sort of scale, and the only one who can really observe the state of matters without entrenching himself into the mess is...well, God, of course.

Is there a point to all this? Not particularly. I was just thinking, as I often do, and following this flickering trail of considerations into whatever wacky places they might choose to take me.

On a somewhat more grounded note, "The Wild Party" is going rather well, and it's hard to believe we're nearing the end of our second week. Saturday matinee shows start tomorrow, and Luis is coming to see it in the afternoon. I wonder if we can catch a movie tomorrow night after the show...*ponder ponder*