Pins

I realized tonight that there will always be a million options floating in space,

and each of those million options will have a billion possible decisions,

and that each of those decisions will pull your heart and mind in all sorts of simultaneous directions,

and that nothing will ever actually line up perfectly,

and that those tensions will forever persist,

and questions of balance and priority will always emerge to surface when you least suspect,

and there will never be a best answer,

but you still have to make a decision.

I realized tonight that decisions are like pinning something to a wall.

If you never place a pin down, if you never hold anything stable, all the directions will always be meaningless relative to one another. Relativity without a point of reference is absolute chaos. In a state of absolute chaos, everything always looks good and bad at the same time, there is no such thing as a meaningful decision. 

But once you make the choice to place one pin, you give your universe a center. And the decisions you make can now be read in relation to that center. 

And then you place another pin, and now you have a line. You have a relationship between two decisions. Now you've created a new kind of tension, but this tension has stability to it. It's meaningful tension. It's a tension that lasts long enough that it can be broken. It's not just some bump between two objects tumbling through space. Two points make a line. That line has a slope, a direction. 

And now you place another pin, and you've created a shape. And you keep on placing pins, and you build your web of history and memory. And each pin makes life more complicated. It adds complexity, but it also adds another level of depth in meaning. More meaningful relativity and connectivity. 

I want to build a great big web.

I want the shape of that web to be beautiful, and full. 

I want to build a life that touches many corners of the universe.

Sometimes it will feel so messy I might as well be floating in an unpinned world.

But that's just panic, that's just the choice of allowing yourself to panic.

We've all placed pins in our lives.

We've also removed pins from our lives.

Nothing is permanent, but that doesn't mean nothing is nothing or nothing is chaos.

The web changes, the history and the memories can mutate.

I guess now I'm wondering, which are the unmovable pins?

Which are the pins you never lift off the page?

Love.

Art.

Family.

Which are the petrified?

Which are the unmovable stones?

Hope.

Meaning.

Faith.