Walking the Road.

Now that there is some doubt around the prospect of my continued habitation in the Shire, I was thinking this morning about a particular missed opportunity. I went straight to the bottom line, the point at which wisdom might predicate that there is no such thing as a missed opportunity. There is only the road that has been travelled, and that road was ever inexorably led by the Determinist principle – the doctrine that every decision, act, and ‘accident’ of fate was the effect of a cause, however obscure that cause might have been. In short, the ‘missed’ opportunity never existed because the cause that would have brought it to fruition didn’t exist.

But, as with everything else in the matter of understanding life, it gets complicated. And it seems there is only one way to proceed: continue to exercise free will wherever possible, and then observe the consequences with as much equanimity as you can muster. It’s the second part that I find most difficult at times. The bagel I’m about to have for my lunch, for example, probably isn’t the healthiest of options.