Nothing Can Come of Nothing

It's been a great long while since I've read King Lear.  A couple of years, really, since I've either read or watched anything Shakespearean at all.  But as I was mulling over some things I'm not entirely sure that I'm content with, this phrase popped into my head.

I frequently go through periods where I feel as though I get antsy with everyone and everything.  The antsy-ness may or may not be visible, I really don't know, but I sometimes find myself wishing that I could just run away from everything for a while until I get myself sorted out.

Sometimes it passes through, just a brief visitor reminding me that there's no such thing as feeling absolutely settled with everything.  And sometimes it stays for a while, prompting and re-prompting an assessment of things that I can change, that maybe I should change, that maybe I just need a longer reminder can be changed.  Sometimes it morphs into the winter, spring, summer, and fall of my discontent.

I've been known to ponder running away to escape this feeling, but I know that's patently ridiculous: anything internal would follow me.  It's a silly impulse since I've only discovered two ways of getting rid of this sensation--waiting it out and actually making a change.

And I'm starting to wonder about whether I should make a change, because Lear keeps popping into my brain.  Nothing can come of nothing, and I need to make some choices.  I need to take some actions or I need to choose not take some actions.

But in the meanwhile any time I encounter this feeling, I have a feeling this saying will be swimming around in my brain until I choose.  Doing nothing, choosing nothing, will result in nothing.

Choosing

I've been thinking a lot about choices recently, probably because I just finished Matched, a novel that seems in some ways to be the child of 1984 and The Hunger Games. (Or rather, that's how I perceive its literary lineage. After finishing, I thought it had similarly dystopic elements to THG and 1984's insistence on the importance of controlling language--albeit more subtlely than 1984.)

Complete book review, by the way, will be forthcoming on the book blog. Tomorrow or the day after.

Anyway, one of the takeaway messages from the novel (unsurprisingly) revolved around the idea of making choices, i.e. there was an implication that we are defined by the sum of the choices we make.

One of the difficulties I have with books such as these is that if there are a limited range of choices a character can make, can that character only have a limited range? And what about choices that are neither good nor bad? Not all choices have a lasting moral impact.

Having grown up in an environment where I've been told that we are to respect and love people even if we don't expect and love their choices, I struggle with this conflation between character and choice. It's too easy. Too tidy. And ironically enough, entirely too complicated when put into practice.

I suppose that's an innate difficulty of assuming that any one element of a life affects character: we are all a conglomeration of choices, habits, and personality traits that we were just born with. Our interactions with others help define us in small way. There's no such things as a real-life, simply motivated human.

There can't be.

In Which Into the Woods Causes Me to Have an Epiphany

So there I sat on Tuesday night, "culturing my friend." That's what I call it, anyway. Because really, everyone should see Into the Woods just once. They'll love it or they won't, in my experience. A good friend from work despises it because it does not end neatly or tidily. I love it for exactly the same reason. And my friend hadn't seen it all, which I considered a travesty worthy of ramification. Therefore: Netflix to the rescue!

As we listened to Cinderella's "On the Steps of the Palace," I said something aloud about how I wished it were true that I could "decide not to decide." Unfortunately, I quickly pointed out, I didn't think that was allowed.

Without going into any specific details, I have found myself in quite a quandary lately. A conundrum, if you will, where I felt that I was being faced with a couple of different choices (between two situations and between two people, and no, you're not getting any more information than that) and where I continually felt as though I were constantly being torn between the two sides of each choice. At various times, all of the choices have seemed right: that, in itself, has made attempting to choose extremely difficult. To say the least.

And then, as I walked home from work yesterday, that phrase popped into my head again as the answer to my current quandary/conundrum: the very instability inherent in the choices themselves clearly demonstrates (to me, anyway) that now is not a good time to decide. Instead, I have a very strong feeling that I should live my life, keep myself busy, and do what I need to do. The choices, one way or another, will sort themselves out to a point where I can make them.

But that can't happen while I obsess about those choices. So I've stopped obsessing about them. I'm throwing myself into other things and keeping myself busy. And so far, I haven't had much time to think about them.

Hopefully, by the time I do, clarity will have entered the equation.