So I’m very late to posting on this prompt, but I made sure to save it when I saw the question earlier this month. After the rush of the ICGAN conference, I have returned to a hermit-academic mode and thus now seems like a perfect time to revisit this in earnest.
When I saw this prompt I was immediately flashed back to some unknown time in my childhood/early teenage years where, as any good philosopher-Sagittarius kid does, I was discussing with friends about how we understood free will.
I was pretty confident in my answer, and largely it hasn’t changed in all that time. I hadn’t really thought of it much in detail prior to this circle chat of friends, but it came out as if I had spent time researching on it. Perhaps somewhere on some leaking-through timeline I had.
“Goalposts”
“Goalposts?”
I remember grabbing a piece of paper to try to demonstrate my understanding – it ended up looking like some sort of path through an invisible maze.
“Basically, we all have goals we have to achieve in life, certain doorways we eventually have to cross through. No matter how many different paths you take, in whatever direction, or for whatever time…” I drew a line going in all kinds of loops and paths, crossing through some goals on the paper earlier on, before looping back and going through others nearer the start of where my pencil had hit the page. “…you eventually have to go through your destined goal posts.”
It seems overtly simple, in retrospect, and yet I still think I largely believe this is true.
As we move through life, there are things we encounter that we either run from or run towards — things that change us, shape us, or catalyze something within our lives or those around us. Sometimes they manifest like cyclical lessons; dating the same archetypes of people over and over again, or finding yourself in the same work-culture dynamics. Other times, moments feel really big that otherwise don’t seem like they should be as impressed upon us as we feel them to be.
My journey through preparation for the ICGAN conference, from January through to earlier this month. Each step was small, but I felt the goalpost getting closer, like Atreyu walking towards the Southern Oracle. The fear of his experience with the first gate dancing in his eyes as he flickers between the faces of the statues, and yet, a different path is had here. Here, following the trials and tribulations he receives his reward, essential knowledge for his greater journey.
I too felt that familiar fear creep in leading up to various conference deadlines — some latent expectation that I would be struck down if I didn’t pass the test ahead. I was anxious, I was struggling to put words to paper, and I was oscillating with periods of self doubt that I could do it at all.
But, like Atreyu, I pushed through the gates anyway. I talked to my peers, to my mentors, and I reflected back on all the work that had been done already. I was confident in what I knew, in what I’ve studied, but I was struggling with how to translate that to the audience I would be presenting to. It felt so big that I was letting it cloud what I was there to do. Then my supervisor told me, “You’ve already won, just be yourself.” (where winning was getting accepted in the first place). And he was right. Somehow that little phrase, that burst of energy, was enough to have me rush through the first gate before I was struck down at the beginning. It worked because I knew, deep down, he was right.
That rightness as it happened went deeper than just support given in a time of need. It re-ignited a fire that had been with me since beginning of this process, that I had such a strong feeling about; I was approaching one of these goalposts.
As much as my emotions took me on a rollercoaster, there was the underlying track that kept me grounded. That in many ways this was inevitable. I knew I would not give up —for better or for worse I would stand up in front of the conference and speak to something regardless of how good it was, I knew that I was on the ride. You can’t get off mid-coaster1.
The closest I think I’ve come to seeing this experience in the wild, and what came to me a few nights before the presentation itself, is the concept of “fixed points in time” from Doctor Who. Moments in time that you can’t change, that are inevitable, that need to happen (in some fashion). They can’t be altered – but they can sometimes be circumvented (sometimes even causing the events to occur in the process of trying to circumvent them – e.g. Pompeii). The Doctor claims to be able to feel or know when things are fixed or not, and following this concept of goalposts it kinda makes sense to me.
Perhaps it’s just the vast quantity of Doctor Who I’ve been watching these days, including tracing back to the very beginning, that’s shaping where I’m ending up here, but suffice to say I do believe in a kind of destiny or fate. But aside from very specific instances, we often have control over how we get there or how long it takes us. Some goalposts we decide to take down, others get erected by choices that we make, but their existence persists because they existed in the first place.
Maybe it’s the lessons we need to learn, the patterns we need to master that creates them. Perhaps it’s the domino effect from certain atoms coming together and reflecting off into predictable directions. Maybe it’s a big game we’ve all logged into with a certain set of quests in mind that we don’t remember —maybe it’s just that we make our fate ourselves with every choice we make. Our destiny, our fate, is literally written every moment by where we put our attention — something we feel our way through the best we can.
“Every great decision creates ripples, like a huge boulder dropped in a lake. The ripples merge and rebound off the banks in unforeseeable ways. The heavier the decision, the larger the waves, the more uncertain the consequences.”
– 7th Doctor, Remembrance of the Daleks
- I mean, you can, but in most cases you probably shouldn’t or wouldn’t…that’s a different journey for this metaphor. ↩︎
My Life, or Something Like It 