Free will ain't nothing but a hound dog

All beauty in the world stems from imperfection.  That's because it's honest and has nothing to hide.  Everyone's racing around, trying to be perfect.  Anne Lamott said it really nice, "perfectionism is based on the belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won't have to die.  The truth is that you will die anyway."  We all want the perfect job, the perfect girlfriend, the perfect car, the perfect house....It goes on and on in cycles trying to get everything perfect, then you die.  What if it's not all perfect?  What if we live an uncomfortable life?  Does that make us any less human, any less real, any less purposeful to the universe? 

There's still this stigma that people without money are less important.  And if it doesn't pay good money, it's not worth our time.  We're stuck in a time-loop of want, of needing to live as comfortably as we can.  And that's all we can do.  We really have no control over our lives.  I mean, if nature wants to knock a tree down on top of you, who's gonna stop it?  My girlfriend told me this story about a mother and father who had just picked up their daughter from a sleepover she was gonna have.  She didn't feel and and didn't want to spend the night, so they got her to drive home.  At a stoplight, then heard a thunderous crash behind them.  A massive birch tree had split and fallen onto their car, killing their daughter instantly.  The mother and father remained untouched, as if some shaman had put a protection spell around them. 

It reminds me of the climax of the movie 127 hours where a nature hiker got trapped, literally, between a rock and a hard place.  While I didn't particularly enjoy staring up James Franco's crusty nostrils for two hours, the motif he was thinking about got me thinking too.  The hiker,Aaron, said something like,"I chose this.  My whole life led me to this situation.  This rock from a meteor spent millions of years waiting for this one moment.  I wanted to be alone from everyone, I chose this." 

We call it free will but it's not as free as we think it is.  The idea of will and movement is free only as far as the mind will let us be.  Circumstances happen and then we make choices.  We could have made those choices years ago, depending on our conditioning, how we grew up, what personality we developed.  And where we grew up happened from our parents' lives, and so on down the family tree.  The truth is we have no control, and free will is just comfort food.  The only choice we have to be comfortable or imperfect.  If we are imperfect, we become honest with nothing to hide.  And that is the most natural state we can live with.