What is free will?

In the past decade, I have experienced moments of utter helplessness.

About six years ago, the intense pain and stiffness of polymyalgia rheumatica had been setting in over the course of a week. My hips and shoulders and to some degree my elbows and knees had become so painful and stiff I couldn’t lower myself onto or off of a chair, the toilet, or my bed. So I went to the hospital. A porter wheeled me through emergency to the ultrasound room and parked me just outside. The ultrasound technician offered to help me walk to the bed and I burst into tears because I couldn’t move a muscle. I managed to say, through sobs, “please get my husband.” Michael was in the waiting room. This was new to us and we didn’t have the language worked out yet about this kind of partnership: when my body becomes our responsibility.

Back in 2012, I had a flareup of IBS that lasted for the next few years. There were many moments of helplessness at that time also, because I already had poor control over elimination functions. One helpless moment stands out in memory. I was parked at the Haliburton Health Centre and headed in for an appointment. I didn’t have the toonie needed to get back out of the parking lot because I planned to get change from the reception desk upstairs. Then I had an accident before I got into the building. I hadn’t learned to prepare for these things yet or to cope with them very well. And this time I was also trapped in the parking lot with poop running down inside my jeans. I desperately wanted to just get home and get cleaned up. I looked around for a sympathetic face, someone to give me a coin. Teary-eyed, I explained my situation to a dubious cab driver waiting near the entrance and he gave me a toonie.

I feel such compassion for the person I was then and what she went through. But I learned a lot about myself in those years. Like how much I already felt irrationally fearful going into benign situations like the bank or a retail store. I was able to shed that fear because the real possibility of making a smelly mess in public brought it to the forefront. That old fear was based on feeling unwelcome/unwanted wherever I went. What a relief to let that go! I also learned a unique kind of bravery — to go out and do things regardless of a serious stigma in society. This kind of bravery has helped with the MS too — moving very slowly is perfectly okay with me while the rest of the world is busy speeding up.

Several weeks ago, I had a bad fall and bruised some ribs. For the week after that fall, I needed help once again getting up and down, I needed help putting on my undergarments and pants, socks and shoes. Possibly the most disappointing result of that fall is not being able to swim. Swimming is the only form of aerobic exercise I get. I was counting on it to help me be in good shape for surgery. On April 11th, I’ll have a bilateral mastectomy. It is unclear when I’ll be able to swim again. I’m not supposed to lift heavy things while in recovery. Ha! I do the equivalent of 100 push-ups a day to haul around this weak lower body. While there are moments of sadness and anger coming up now, I can usually just watch the mind playing out its dramas — thanks to my meditation practice. One of those dramas is the expectation of upcoming helplessness. What arises in response is panic.

I’m currently working through a series of meditations called Holistic Clearing. They were developed by Namgyal Rinpoche, founder of the Dharma Centre of Canada. Panic is a perfectly natural response to the circumstances I’m in. It is also a mental factor that I can objectively observe. I can notice how it plays out in the body and let it teach me something. These difficulties can become more workable. They become opportunities to learn about the habitual behaviour patterns that hinder living a full life. Like learning back in 2012 how fear was holding me back. And finding that unique kind of bravery — it will help me be okay with a flat-chest in a society driven so much by body image.

The poem below wrote itself out of one those holistic clearing meditations. I was letting panic play out in its fullest form and it reminded that, really, we are always helpless. We could be crushed as easily as a mosquito (it's only a matter of scale). Sometimes we get to see this truth in vivid array. Any moment is an unseen and incalculable myriad of little happenings coming together that we label as self, illness, or perfect storm. Free will, agency, and choice, are ideas corralled around a set of happenings. (This is a Buddhist perspective; see below for scientific ones.) A recent ice storm here left the tree branches coated and sparkling in the brilliant sun. In particular, the birch trees were shining white and angel-haired against the dark receding storm clouds. A blue and pink sunset sky emerged. The trees tinkled like chimes in the gentle breeze that remained. This storm was both magical and destructive and it was neither: just causes and conditions. Every one of us saw a different storm and sunset, a different coming together of sun, rain, optics, and more.

I fell hard again yesterday morning and had to miss a chiropractic adjustment to help correct the previous fall. Another setback! And I screamed and screamed at the top of my lungs in frustration. And then I screamed some more. A different kind of release. The three cats and Rios all came to sit in front of me. They were a little unnerved. Now, with a little distance and perspective, I can laugh — because that was like screaming at an ice storm.

Panic

Have you ever known
a thing so gripping
it burns, and with
ice or fire, but
you’re not sure which?

Like the iceberg
in my upper chest
smoothed by the
glare and heat
of a blinding sun

is jagged too
and unbalanced
and heavy, burning
away, but never melting,
sliding into the flesh

of the ocean. Right!
Light and wind bring
space yet forget the main
eighty percent that gravity
calved from a glacier.

In the ocean though —
wide open, bottomless
as far as we can see
darkness in darkness —
the berg slip streams.

It is ocean after all.
It won’t hurry to melt.
It is home, released
again into the bosom
of fathomless mother.

~

Listen to physicist, Leonard Mlodinow, talk about tragedy and free will: Randomness and Choice, an OnBeing interview. And another Krista Tippet interview with astrophysicist, Carlo Rovelli, All Reality is Interaction.

I don't offer an answer to the title question, What is free will? It seems to me that we have the appearance of free will. So, I offer another question, What do we do with it?

Song lyrics

Welcoming Spring