Saturday Mourning: Another Life, With Other People.
On causality and decisions and lives lived in tandem.
Good morning, and happy Saturday! Today’s essay is Part Two of this week’s Three-Part essay series about Process & Parallelism—two themes I have been exploring recently. If you would like to read Part One, you can do so by clicking the link below. And if you have been liking Dog-Eared, it would mean so much to me if you shared this newsletter—doing so directly supports me and my craft. I would also, of course, be immensely grateful.
Process Diary #5 📚
Last weekend, I pitched a tent along the shoreline of Lake Motosu—the westernmost of the Five Fuji Lakes, surrounded by pebbly banks and lush hillsides—with a small group of friends. Only five of them I had known beforehand: my friend, Batya, with whom I had studied at university and who now lives in Tokyo; my previous roommates Magi, Hinata, and Lena, with whom I had lived in Eifuku—a neighborhood in Tokyo’s Suginami ward—when I first moved to Japan; and Kazuki, who moved into that house after I had moved out of it. The trip came together rather quickly, too. Between renting the car and booking the campsite, we had managed to scrape together a lakeside weekend in less than a week. For a group of nine people—all with disparate lifestyles and conflicting schedules—it felt miraculous. We kept uttering things like This is stunning or I can’t believe we are here as we unrolled our sleeping bags and prepped the charcoal grill. And while these quips were mostly us acknowledging the overwhelming and mind-boggling fact that Mt. Fuji was within direct eyesight, they were also—at least for me—ways to articulate the sheer magnitude of having even arrived at such a place.
For several years, I’ve researched causality and its many facets—having found neither fate nor divine intervention to be sufficient explanations for why certain experiences, like falling in love or meeting someone new, can feel exacting and serendipitous while other ones, like graduating from university or marrying a partner, can feel consequential and planned for. As I looked around the campfire at our group—a hodgepodge of Americans, one Costa Rican, several Japanese, and one English—it was hard to ignore the compelling evidence that we were there only because we had all made several decisions, over the course of our nine distinct lifetimes, that brought us together for a shared overnight in Yamanashi, Japan. What felt miraculous, then, wasn’t so much that we were there in front of Mt. Fuji (though that in itself was staggeringly awesome), but that our existence at the shoreline of Lake Motosu could just as easily, and just as miraculously, not have ever come into fruition at all.
I like to believe, though, that we could have arrived at the campfire as a consequence of another entirely opposing system of choices. Yeses instead of nos; lefts instead of rights: it is a hopeless thought experiment, thinking this way, but one that I find myself currently ensnared in. It’s easy to assume that because x caused y, then the occurrence of x is the sole factor for why y exists. We chose to live or work in Tokyo; therefore, we now all know one another, here at the base of Mt. Fuji. But what I’m more interested in is the philosophy behind sufficient causes, not necessary ones—that the existence of y isn’t necessarily because x preceded it. Another factor, z, could just have easily created such an outcome, which begs the question: Is every experience a consequence of a cause, or can some things exist in and of themselves, without meaning and without purpose, but as independent parts—the z factor—working towards nothing at all? What I am trying to work through is accepting the fact that there are many other ways I could have arrived at Mt. Fuji, surrounded by beautiful people and beautiful nature, that I will neither experience nor know, but will feel very deeply to be true.
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