Branching

The ongoing nature of life

“All the insights into human motivation and action, whether literary or scientific, enter our ongoing effort to understand ourselves as possibilities to be explored, extended, ramified, revised, or rejected.”

John Ryder, The Things in Heaven and Earth, p. 149

“Possibilities to be ….”  Can we accept this as a key understanding of what it means to be “human?”  It implies that life is a discovery of possibilities.  Each of us is, if we choose, always unfinished.  More than merely a canvas to be repainted—a becoming, ongoing and irrepressible.  We cannot let go of life if we understand this promise. 

This seems to me to be inherent in many religious perspectives, particularly Christianity.  There is constant growth and the need for compassion toward oneself, so we may accept forgiveness for all the stumbles and foolishness and selfish actions along the way, along the ongoing.

We can be as dead to our past as open to our future.  We have responsibilities to the latter.  I like Ryder’s choice of words.  “Ramified.”  Consequential developments of our choices that extend as branches into complex, and complicated, new growth. 

I once liked Robert Frost’s line.  He claimed that if found again by friends late in life, “they would not find me changed from him they knew/ only more sure of all I thought was true.” 

But the context of the poem points in a contrary direction, as so much of Frost’s verse.  He had ventured into a vastness, stretching to the “edge of doom.”  And it is but “one of my wishes.”  It suggests the temptation we all have, to escape, to detach from life. 

But perhaps it is truly as they say in sci-fi cowboy movies, “one’s destiny,” to stay the course.  So little, really, holds us back.  Guilt, satisfactions, fears, advice of “friends?”  Perhaps it is natural for us to be both risk avoiding and risk taking.  The two faces of the human?  Still, I find it easy (a bit too easy?) to be among those who want a life that is ongoing, mysterious and open ended.