A Happy Glass

Don’t worry, I won’t start my Christmas lights in November. Just an intellectual spark.

One of our most distinguished neuroscientists, Dr. Robert Sapolsky, believes we don’t have free will.

I won’t go in the depths of philosophical disambiguation which will lead us to circles in reasoning—the undoubtable sign of error. I refer here to the manifestation of a free will necessary for the discovery of free will as non-existent, and the impossible-to-stop cyclical run of that question mark.

I better tell you how sometimes free will is forced on us by Fate. Fate not as a path inflicted by a Fairy Godmother, but as the necessity for maximisation of our own personal values, personal experiences—intellectual, emotional, and through the material world.

The gate of decision opens up in front of us and we are pressed against and forced to assume our free will. What to do? Left or right? Or the path disappears in front, sometimes right from under our feet, and we are left with nothing ahead. What to do next?

I realized this happens when we are insensitive to how our free will needs expression. When we have to change, but resist. And the longer our resistance, the bigger the chasm that will crack the earth beneath our feet, when the old ceases to exist.

So, we should use consciously this superpower of ours, and inflict change when change is necessary to better our existence on all our fundamental values.

Therefore, these Holidays let’s choose to be happy. Sure, nobody can be happy by magic—I’m not one of those positing that! But at the gate of your present, where our free will is called to act, it’s important the sign you assume to the future in front.

Right now, I think I’m guilty of using minus, searching for what’s wrong, and what’s lacking, how things are not like they should be, and how bad it hurts whenever I fall.

Then, it makes sense for the shift towards positive to change a lot of things. Culminating, for sure, with moments of happiness.

Therefore, I say, this Holiday Season, let’s choose to be happy, and no matter what, to look at the half-fullness of the glass—you see, you even have to tension language, so habitual the half-emptiness of our life is…the minus.

Be happy. Raise your glass! Fuck it!

P.S. Sapolsky is right, though. Witnessed by a neuroscientist, our free will seems to be a never-ending chain of perfect conditionality enforced by the most rigorous logic. I don’t understand why he’d assume something illogical should happen there to be the witness of our free will. We’re not that insane!