caroline ridgway

Most mornings arrive with minimal fanfare, or advance warning that, by day’s end, anything of consequence will have transpired. Most mornings dawn in the ordinary fashion. Most mornings, while still in bed, I first check non-work emails (mostly junk, only very occasionally something from a real person), then any text messages to have arrived overnight (seldom), and then first of many daily visits to social media for news (ideally not of the fake variety, or at least duly acknowledged as such), updates from my circle, and a hit of validation. Most mornings I brush my teeth while staring at the contents of my closet. Most mornings I make the calculation as to whether it’s prudent to try to exercise now or if I can wait until later, knowing in my heart that later, on many occasions, means it won’t happen at all, and these are the compromises I make with myself. Most mornings I assume the day will end much as it began.

There is, however, occasionally a day that contains, or portends, or both, life on a wholly different scale. On this day, for instance, I received, in short succession, and with equal unpreparedness, news of both the possible hastening of an eventual loss, and the unburying of a sacred treasure related to a prior loss of the stop-the-world variety.

You suppose, in moods as reflective as this, that each day is a gift.

It helps to have a token of faith that the events of life, if not entirely, fatalistically predetermined, are laid out in some basic order. Much like the choose-your-own-adventure books I enjoyed in childhood, a choice leads to an outcome. Unlike in those stories, of course, in life you can’t flip to the end to see how your different choices might stack up, and which seems preferential in the moment.

What if we could flip to the end? Would we? I suspect many of us, in the throes of a loss or heartbreak, or pining for some distant hoped-for conclusion, would say that, yes, we’d like to have insight into the path ahead. But, in truth, the finality of knowing how things would end, and bearing that mantel of foreknowledge would be too much. Therein, perhaps, lies the difference between, say, why a substantial percentage of people are comfortable spending money on psychics, card readings, and the like, all generally (at least so far) acknowledged by empirical assessment to be no better than chance, while whole segments of social science have been devoted to protecting the interests of those seeking medical advice through genetic testing.

Here I am guilty of my own reproach because I have, at various times, sought the counsel of those practitioners of the more spiritual arts. I’ve had my cards read, and my numbers read. I’ve even been advised on the color and scope of my aura. I’ve had people lay their hands on me, in healing energy. I’ve sat in an armchair in a sterile, nondescript office and had a woman to whom I’d just donated way too much money guess at my loss and then tell me that I was energetically surrounded by my spiritual guides.

I did each of these things in good faith, and each has, in its way, in its moment, felt important. I do not know that any of it is real. I have no proof. I have my own doubts, even while seeking out these services, all payable in cash. But I have faith.

I have had shades of this conversation with various people who self-identify as religious but discount the utility of this sort of witchcraft and wizardry. My argument, plainly, is that faith is faith, not because of proof, but because of the lack of it, and subsequently because of personal benefit derived anyway. Whether you believe in God (any version thereof), or unnamed spirit guides, or really anything, the relevant and actionable factor is the belief.

Belief is sustaining, lest it cross over into something more approaching delusion, but in its purest incarnation it is what we all live off of. We all believe – we must, mustn’t we? – that in the end it (“it”) will all be ok (“ok”).

A more eastern-centric perspective might offer that any argument in favor of what will be is null and void because all that there is, is. We have this present moment, in constant eclipse of itself, never replicable, never retrievable, never further in the future than just this instant. In the time it takes me to craft this sentence, I have changed. In the time I have taken since starting this exercise, a whole new world has taken root inside of me. When I finish, and let’s assign an arbitrary assumption of a finishing point for the sake of argument, who knows the person I will be, or the universe I will inhabit.

So, then, do we expect and embrace change as the only constant, or do we imagine our life’s course to some degree plotted out, charted by the stars? Are these mutually exclusive?

To be continued…