When someone tells you they have the only answers, you can be sure you are talking to a liar. In boardrooms around the globe, sharp suits are selling the solutions to our world’s problems, one more level among the multitudes of marketing, not of self-discipline or personal choice but another purchase, to shift the responsibility of corporations onto the individual. The emphasis on buying electric vehicles, on recycling used goods, and the surfeit of surrogate legacy products is an advantaged solution: self-management of our own trash and a marketing push not to consume less but to consume the newer “greener” choices. This presents itself as an alternative but exists as an excuse for nihilism and abandonment of personal responsibility. 

The interest of the corporation remains in the rapid transmission of capital in exchange for something that the buyer wants. Like a maze designed for test subjects, the objectives and routes are clearly set. Our placement in this maze, our consciousness of it, and our own existence are not chosen; it is the human condition. However, if we understand these winding paths and junctions as having been designed, we understand our destination is set, and how we move on this path, not the arrival at some undisclosed prize is what matters. The movement is the prize.

Empathy begins with an understanding that we all have individual selves that desire satisfaction. The now, however, is never fully possible to predict and requires that one exhibit fluidity while knowing that plans are meaningful for potential reactivity but are still only plans existing in a moment that is not now. Interim steps start with adaptation to the facts and making more plans, and here we believe choice is possible, that our actions, in one way or another, will affect the outcome. While this may be true in a limited case of moving right or left of an obstruction, attempting to exit a traffic jam, or to grow wings, or to collectively wishcast your small group of people to be ascended from the earth are some examples of the limitations in this sort of thinking. Choice is always constrained to the possible.

It is all unknown, and even once revealed, also unknown, the adjacent causality, the implications of all of that which did not occur, and the faulty logic and interpretation of that which did. It is with this malleability of reflection and projection, the hidden tremors and the false positives, that we strive to surrender and exist in our solitary moments, adrift and linked and swirling with all solitary moments. A churning sea of causality, infinite and unfathomable. The plan is a sextant that may help us avoid being crushed and pulled under oceans upon oceans in a liquid labyrinth. Given the proper fittings, the vessel is buoyant with a round-bottomed hull that will withstand most weights and weathers. It is built simply or efficiently to increase its possible application. The freightage that it carries allows it to sail in the deeper waters of the now. 

This ship, built for possibility, will eventually run aground and be caught in a reef of other possibilities. The finest steering, bound as it is by destination, is not defined by regret, nostalgia, or even reinvention but by distillation, quieting, clarity, invoking a sense of purpose and place.