"There is No Reality Except Action"

The two-year-old held a Hot Wheel in each fist while making his way through the classroom. He stopped at the sensory table where other two-year-olds were scooping and dumping flax seeds. He dropped the car, not even watching it fall, to grab a fistful of the seeds. It was a single act, the dropping and grabbing. There was no moment for indecision or regret, no thought for the car he was leaving behind. It was an act of pure commitment.

Moments before, he had wanted that car so much that he had wrestled it from another child, but now it lay forgotten at his feet as his full attention turned to the silky flow of massed flax seed. When the boy found that he wanted a scoop, the second car was likewise forgotten.

I admire the ability of very young children to just move on like this, from want to want without a sense of loss in between. In this case, his "storage" capacity was limited by his two hands. He didn't even try to keep the cars and play with the flax seed. The cars were treasures while he held them, each precious for a time, then left behind without a thought.

Someday, he will learn to mourn his losses, to regret, perhaps even to hoard or despair, What if I'd only kept hold of that Hot Wheel? 

This is an aspect of how we often attempt to somehow live our un-lived lives: by refusing to let go. We know it's an illusion, these lives we might have lived if only we'd made different choices, so we hold on even when life itself calls for us to grab hold with both hands. We would like to commit to a new future, but we find our fists are already full. For the longest time, I kept my baseball bat and glove, just in case. I still have them. They're in the garage, I think, taking up space, gathering dust, coming to my attention only when I happen across them while looking for something else. I know I should have long ago dropped them at my feet, but they have moved with me a dozen times, from garage to attic to cellar.

The philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre wrote, "There is no reality except in action." This popped into my mind as I watched the boy grab-and-drop his way about the classroom, not aware that with each choice he made, each positive commitment he made to one option, be it a car or flax seed, meant he was simultaneously rejecting an infinite number of other possibilities. But he knew them for what they are: illusions. It's action, not possibilities, that creates our reality.

I'm inspired by a two-year-old's capacity to commit themselves wholly to each decision.

In his book Gut Feelings: Short Cuts to Better Decision Making, Gerd Gigerenzer writes, "Deliberate thinking about reasons seems to lead to decisions that make us less happy." Everyone has experienced "paralysis by analysis." Even highly trained athletes or actors can choke if they think too much. 

The past holds us because, whatever else it is, it's at least familiar, and therefore safe, even if it no longer serves us. We look to the future with our lists of pros and cons in the hope that we can control it by choosing the perfect life partner or university or career path or neighborhood or whatever. 

And all too often, we find that we're stuck in between clinging to both the Hot Wheels and the flax seed, committing to neither. It's not our decisions, but our commitment to them that determines whether or not we made the right one. A wedding isn't a marriage. A degree isn't a career.

The boy, untethered from the past and unaware of any future, epitomizes the creative force of the universe -- action -- moving through the classroom, through life, unafraid to commit and commit and commit again. I will never again be that boy, but man does he inspire me.

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