If On A Winter's Night...

It was cold as balls tonight as I was taking a walk in only a hoodie and some gloves after a 20 minute workout. A lot of doubts were running through my head and, of course, passing by the scenery of Brooklyn Heights and Dumbo I had the fleeting fantasy of being a twenty-something year old millionaire with a condo perfectly overlooking the East River.

Can't survive on such self-indulging fantasies; and if you have to wait for that moment in your life to find meaning, then million dollars or not, you're stuffed. That tied in with all my Taleb-inspired thoughts about randomness and how to live with it and reminded me of part of why I came to love studying narratives:

Narratives are the only thing that truly belong to us. We can't (for the most part) control what happens to us, but we can choose how to make sense of it. We can't control the material consequences of our situation, but we can choose how they shape our intentionality. I feel as if more than anything, this is what atheists misunderstand about religion; the primacy of subjective narratives over objective facts.*

Narrative lets us live for the moment as connected with the associations of the past and the projections and unknowns of the future.

-------------------------------------------------------------------

*It may be accurate to say that what religion deals with is eminently subjective; the multiplicity of narratives in our lives that can only be understood as subjective experiences.