One Big Timeline

If I choose to stop writing this blog, how can I be sure that I actually chose to do so and it wasn’t predicted beforehand, making my “choice” of doing so not a choice at all? The truth is, I can’t. If I were “a Tralfalmadorian, seeing time as you might see a stretch of the Rocky Mountains” (Vonnegut Pg. 85-86), my perception of not only the future, past, and present would change, but so would my perception of life altogether. What is the purpose of a life lived when nothing will happen and everything has happened beforehand? Is the purpose of life simply to be? By saying that “all time is all time” (Vonnegut Pg. 86), the alien kidnapper insinuates the possibility of the present, past, and future existing as one entity and at the same time. “all time” (past, present, and future) exists at all times. When you are born, you are dying and being conceived, all at once. Shall we, then, see life as simply a live time-line, where one sees the video of life with ability to fast-forward and rewind?

If you “Take it moment by moment, you will find that we are all…bugs in amber” (Vonnegut Pg. 86). By ‘bugs in amber’, Vonnegut describes the purposelessness of our life, and our great inability to do anything about it. What motivation have we to live, knowing that everything is planned for us? If we shall release ourselves unto the uncontrollable rivers of life, we would capitulate the meaning and pleasures of life. Knowing that we have the choice to do good or bad leaves us with a great responsibility, but also with a great sense of pride, knowing that whatever has become of us is product of the choices we made in the past. Our life is our life’s work, not the figment of written history.

If it were proven before us, that free will is merely a figment of our many hopes and dreams, does that mean that we are free to do anything we please? Does it mean that we can stop trying so hard to make life for ourselves? What then, would happen? I believe that unless we gain the ability to envision time in the perspective of the Tralfalmadorians, we shall always attempt to make the choices that will form a better life for us. We would never surrender our “illusions” of free-will without solid evidence of the “all time is all time” theory.