Stuff to See!

What Is Time

I like having friends that make me think.
A friend of mine (Hi Brooke!) sent me a rather cogent email the other day (Easter, as some would have it) that made me think about a number of things. I won't go into everything, but the closing comment has burned itself into my mind for the time being:

"Of course, the right choices are not always made easily, even if they sit directly in front of you. Perhaps time plays an even bigger part than I originally thought. The right choice is not always presented at the right time. Time can be a bastard or a blessing."

As I sit in my dusky dusty hovel listening to N.W.A. and pondering the truth of these words, I find myself almost going back on my first response to her holiday missile.
I mentioned something about being an opportunist, taking life as it comes and not worrying too much about things outside of my control. This much is true and cannot be denied, but it falls short of the totality of my thinking on this matter. Then again, I never feel satisfied about getting the entirety of my thought across in any format, where one can spend a minute or a year trying to express a nuance and, more often than not, failing. Then again, I hold that the barriers humans have with respect to communication have helped our species evolve to its current point, and simultaneously show both our greatest strengths and most poignant weaknesses.
As another Zen(o) would have said 2200 years ago, our actions are not so telling for us as are our reactions to events outside of our control. This is the boiled down Reader's Digest definition of stoicism in my opinion, and it's something that I hold as a core belief. But to what extent is it possible to reconcile this with the question of the importance of one's wishes and desires?
Sure, there have been times in my life (like, all of them) when I've wished that this, that, or the other element of my life was different (such as my financial situation). On the whole, I'm pretty happy with my life, even if I'm essentially dissatisfied with most individual elements of it.
I take 'time' in the above quote to mean circumstance more so than the fourth dimension of physical extent in what most people understand to be the universe. This is circumstantial thinking, obviously, and quite easy to deconstruct based on the wishy-washy relativistic nature of interpersonal communication, where a different nuance is implied than what ends up being inferred, but what of it? Circumstance is largely out of my control, and all the decisions I've made, right or wrong, have to be considered in the light of the circumstances, or more fittingly, my interpretation of said circumstances, that obtained at the time (there's that word again). Making the right choice, whatever that may mean, at the wrong time, whatever that may mean, seems to be the equal of making the wrong choice, or, as the stoics would say, the wrong reaction.
In a similar vein, I read something in a review of a Star Trek episode, of all places, that bears on this topic. What was said was that it was possible to make the right choice and still end up doing the wrong thing. I understand what the reviewer meant in this case, but I've always had a problem with it. I just couldn't put my finger on it, as it were, but I can now. The statement's truth or falsehood depends on just how many elements of circumstance one can accept at the same time. I'll put this in the context it was originally written, more or less.
The 'right choice' at the time referred to America's stance on German activity prior to World War II, that of a proposed isolationism. The right choice was to remain peaceful, to not kill more human beings, to be a good neighbor, more or less. Had this happened, according to the particular episode (The City on the Edge of Forever, one of the highlights of the original series), the Nazis would have developed the atomic bomb, and Earth would never have joined the idyllic United Federation of Planets. Sure, it's right thing, in general, to refrain from killing one's neighbors. It is also the right thing to stop those who would kill others and take away what Jefferson would call "certain inalienable rights" of their neighbors in turn. Or, as Shakespeare would say, "to take up arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them". Or, as I would say, to fight the right fight. The reviewer's words ring true, but they suffer from a multiplicity of perspectives. While it is a good thing to be aware of multiple and differing perspectives, it's not always wise to be the servant of too many masters, or an actor upon too many different agendas.
So I'll come back to the idea of making the right choice at something other than the right time. The further the distance between the right choice and the right time, the more and more that the right choice becomes, in effect, the wrong choice. Timing, in this case, really is everything.
With six billion people in the world prosecuting their own agendas for self-fulfillment and the forces of nature present in all things on this planet, there is very little that is in our direct control outside of our own reactions. For each of us, our own reactions form at least half of our experiences in life, so from an individual perspective, that can seem like a lot, but from the point of view of the whole canvas spread across this earth, it's infinitesimal. Some people may find this depressing and start to feel that they mean very little in the grand scheme of things. They're right in that they mean very little, but wrong in attributing a sense of worthlessness to the very real and relevant prosecution of their own lives. Mixing perspectives can be very dangerous if said perspectives end up getting lost, as they often do, but it can be done without harm. The right perspective depends on the observer and is so variable as to be too wishy-washy to define precisely.
Is that a dodge? Probably so, but I can do no better. I'll live and die as an individualist, and the best I can do in espousing this particular philosophy is to explain how I apply it to my own life. Perhaps in time I'll be able to boil it down for general application like so much skin cream, but for the moment I can't divide the philosophy from the philosopher.
And that, too, is right.