Life Path

"Every man is born as many men and dies as a single one."
– Martin Heidegger

Heidegger stated the obvious. Or perhaps it is obvious only because Heidegger stated it. I suppose it appears we make choices. But maybe choices are made for us. Maybe all the days of our lives exist in a single instant, like a motion picture film. You can hold the reel in your hand and it’s all there – the beginning, the middle, the end – all at the same time, existing in a single moment. You must run the film through a projector, frame-by-frame, to experience its reality, just as we must be born, live day-by-day, and die in order to experience our reality. Can the people in the movie make choices? At any given moment it appears to us that the people in the movie are choosing their paths. But at the same time we know that their destinies are already decided, and not a bit of their reality can be changed.

Maybe we step into the lifetime that best challenges our weaknesses. Isn’t that how we grow?

Looking forward from our beginning, our path seems to run past many doors. Some doors open but most never do. The doors begin to close early. Geography, family connections, environment, nurture, physical and mental aspects of our being: each unlocks some doors while firmly locking others. With the perspective of time we look back and see that many doors never were accessible to us, despite well-intentioned clichés about positive thinking and being all we can be; catch-phrases that assure us we can do anything, be anything, if we patiently persevere. It’s an illusion, a sleight of hand, a deception that allows us to credit ourselves for our successes and blame others for their failures, even as those others were locked on their own unswerving paths.

“Every man is born as many men” – to his doting parents and grandparents, maybe.