I stand at many crossroads

Existential anxiety and decision making

I stand upon infinite crossroads. It isn’t that I stand at one crossroad with infinite paths. I seem to keep moving along between crossroads with finite paths but I always find myself at another crossroad. The one direction I can’t go is backwards. I can go backwards and slightly left, backwards and slightly right. Even backwards and slightly up, slightly down, but I can never go directly backwards. Each road branches off into infinitely more roads and decisions that I need to take. Even indecision is a decision.

Somehow, I keep making ones that I can agree with, if only tentatively. I can’t trace every crossroad I’ve encountered. I can’t trace exactly why I chose to have coffee instead of tea in the morning, or why I decided to wake up at the time I did, or why I decided to read something. Only towards the end can I really reflect on my journey. every once in awhile I find myself in limbo. Well not in limbo, maybe something more cozy and less sterile. I find myself in a town. Sometimes in a city. There, there are still crossroads but they seem less urgent. I can walk down a street for a really long time and admire the people and shops that pass me by. I can even stop for a moment and get an ice cream or a beer, possibly chat with someone. For that moment, that seems like the only path I will ever tread. The existential anxiety associated with each path is a mere crashing wave on the horizon of my mind. It fades as it reaches the shores of my thought, where it doesn’t surface again. Until I find myself once again at the cross roads.

You may be asking yourself why I’m thinking of this. Why I want to see every decision as a crossroads. Even the decision of whether to shit now or later. Especially the decision to fart in front of a group of people. Do you realize how much I think about farting? Should I do it in public? should I do it in front of my friends? Is it acceptable? Who can I blame for this foul mess? Will it linger? These are all crossroads that must be crossed, and you cannot go back once they have passed you.

This talk of crossroads reminds me a bit of Kierkegaard, the Danish philosopher. He has a concept of anxiety that is so tied up with existential matters. Kierkegaard believes that anxiety is the “dizziness of freedom”. It is the realization of all the possibilities that lay before you but also the realization that there is only one form of actuality. He even talks about the possibility of possibility. This sort of thought spurs me on. It makes me want to think of my life as a continuum of possible moments that have been actualized in a flurry of conscious and unconscious decisions.

Sometimes the crossroads accumulate into highways. Highways that we are all travelling down, with exits to small towns on the side. We all want to get to the cities at the end of the highway. We don’t want to take the exit to the middle of nowhere. But some do. Some want to dwell where no one has thought to dwell. There are Software Engineers at Microsoft that quit their job to become goose farmers. We meet each other on these highways, but we take different exits.

Sometimes, there are special people who want to explore the country roads with you. People who want to get out of the car and get into the forest. Where the crossroads are fewer and the views prettier. Sometimes you get to a clearing where there are no defined crossroads. A clearing in the forest is similar to a crossroads, yet it has no defined paths. No structure to marry to the pavement in an effort to direct you upon lives way. There are only trails that lead out of the clearing, but in that moment you can move freely in the clearing. You have decisions to make, maybe in conversation, but nothing that forces you to take a path already prescribed to you. In that moment, you feel the freedom associated with existence, the freedom to move in any direction you may wish. This all taking place in a definite area.

In life, I seek the clearing. I seek the forest and the mountains and the majestic views that tower over or under you. The highway is livable though. There are stops along the way that will get you gas, food, and drinks. Nature lacks this, or at least doesn’t have it as readily as our human-made designs.

I fear the crossroads will not stop. They will only become more heavy as I move along them. But this fear is misplaced. A heavier decision implies more weight, but this may not be the metaphor I am trying to use. There is a certain amount of importance attached to some of my decisions now. I can either do one thing or do another, but there is seriously no going back as you move further and further into life. At a certain point, you’ve accumulated so many decisions and coincidences that you must live within the structure you’ve created.

Maybe if the decisions were building materials, the decisions that I make now are the heavy parts of the foundation that anchor my home to the ground, to a ground. I am ready to add on to the structure and to live in the house that I have built all on my own. The crossroads to get to it will be long and they will be separated by clearings and mountains and city pavement and highways and all other manner of byways, but they will have to be taken nevertheless. To rue the possible home that you could have had is pointless. You must remodel what you have and work with what you have to truly make your place a dwelling.

by the way, here’s a picture of me tied up by one of my students.