This is the worst box of chocolates that I've ever had to force down my throat...

“Momma always said dyin’ was a part of life. I sure wish it wasn’t… I don’t know if momma was right or if, if it’s Lieutenant Dan. I don’t know if we each have a destiny, or if we’re all just floating around accidental-like on a breeze, but I, I think maybe it’s both.” – Forrest Gump (1994)

Here is the million-dollar question: what makes things happen the way that they do? Do we determine every step of our lives with every choice or action no matter how big or small? Are the paths of our lives predetermined rendering us incapable of altering or changing the course of events? These are the two extremes. Then, there is the middle ground – the infinite “Golden Mean” – in which many of us forms our ideologies of causality in the world. A lot of people want to know how things are allowed to happen, and why they have to happen. Some people ask themselves, very much like Forrest, why people have to die. I think the error in asking this is that we focus our attention to the result – the end – rather than on the process of getting there – the means.

Society seems like an end-result entity, tending to focus on where we end up, rather than how we get there. I think life, as it is itself transient, is made of a much more ephemeral composition. The end, the destination, is ever-lasting, which gives me no information about anything that came before it. For instance, if I look at the arithmetic equation “2+2=4,” I can observe that “4” is the result, or the sum as it were while “2+2” is the method of getting to the result. Which half of the equation tells you the important stuff? If we continue as we seem to be going already, then the result – 4 – would be the important part. On its own, however, “4” explains nothing of any substance. Is it 1+3, 2+2, 2X2, 16/4, 22? On the other hand, “2+2” actually explains something that can be ingested and understood. “2+2” can only equal four. Furthermore, it tells us exactly what steps were taken in order to reach four. In essence, we understand something intrinsic about “4” by knowing that it came to be through “2+2.”

So what’s my point? On the level of the individual, life has a starting point and it has an ending point and it would appear that neither of these points explains anything significant about the individual. It is rather everything that happens in between those two points that are of substance. Case in point, he was born February 12, 1809 in Kentucky and died April 14, 1865 in Maryland. I know nothing about this man other than a small amount of useless facts. When I examine the space in between these two points, the space composed of this man’s actions, I will know something about him. The process of this man’s life will determine whether or not he is to be remembered. This man was Abraham Lincoln.

Watching “Forrest Gump” for the first time in a long while the other night made me rethink the quotation from the movie at the top of this post. Whether the movie focused on personal inadequacies, reckless life decisions, abusive childhoods, unfortunate circumstances, and even death, it would appear that the narrative arc visible throughout the movie was that despite it all, you must keep going forward because we can never understand today until we see tomorrow. We just have to remember that the way something ends has nothing to do with what that something means. Life is a hard thing, but it’s all about perspective:

“When it is dark enough, you can see the stars." – Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Instead of complaining that the rosebush is full of thorns, be happy that the thorn bush has roses.” - Proverb