At any given moment in time, we are faced with a moral imperative— whether we know it or not. That is, we can seize the moment by taking action in whatever various ways our situation, creative imagination and willpower allow us, or we can delay taking action until further decision. When is waiting prudent, and when is patience not a virtue but a vice? Only time will tell, goes the oft-repeated adage, when we live in a realm of uncertainty, when each choice we make may carry a good intention at best without any guarantee of our hoped-for aims materialising.
It’s important to realise in life the context-dependency of the manifold choices to act we will get if we carry with us the luck, care, and/or tenacity of those who continue to survive— as also the circumstantial effects of delaying action—, for no one moment in time can ever be repeated, even if we can discern patterns of likeness emerging whereby we may find ourselves in similar situations over and over again. If experience is capable of being our guide, we must learn to learn something of what appears repetitious, in order to play the hand we are dealt to the greatest perfection. But ultimately, each moment is an opportunity that we cannot expect to get back, and there is usually less guidance from above shined forth on us than we would like to admit.
What does this mean today, in our current situation, in our current time and place? This question we must remind ourselves to ask, as delay in action is in itself an action and one that I am all too guilty of, when receding to my inner world or being dragged out into the cybersphere of social media notifications, endless bite-sized bits of information and content, the viewing of which is likewise another action.
The question here is when are our actions choices and when do we stop thinking of them as matters of choice? People today often speak of social media as an agent with a mind of its own that seduces us into swallowing hours of our time without us even noticing how or why we continue to remain immersed in staring at our phones. Internet and social media use becomes an addiction, in which due to prior choices, we find ourselves in a position where our ability to choose has been replaced by blind compulsion.
And though I speak of social media and internet addiction, I did not describe in much detail the vast ranges of content, which to varying degrees entice the viewer to continue to view, until moving on to the next image or reel, ad nauseam. What we are being sucked into absorbing into our psyches and how it is affecting us is just as vital as being aware of the simple fact that we are becoming conjoined with the cybersphere ecosystem of our phones. The ‘what’ matters just as much if not more than the simple ‘how.’
However, do we really lose the ability to choose? If addiction is a lifetime term and condition, how would we have in the world so many people who have broken free of their addictions? And if we ask ourselves when the best time would be to break our habit, is not the answer always ‘now’?
Some look to the philosophy of ‘now’ as a way to break feelings of anxiety and the rumination of depression, directing the mind to objects of observation perceived by the five senses, our sense of proprioception, the emotional awareness of our empathy towards others, our awareness of our own thoughts and mental images, our instincts, and our gut intuitions. To choose to live in the ‘now’ holds no moral content by itself, rather being value neutral and detached from, for example, the vast canons of the various lengthy traditions of moral philosophy the world over. We can, though, by practicing reclaiming the moment we are in as being within our domain of choice, choose what to do with our ‘now.’
While sitting down to write this essay, time has elapsed, many events in the world have transpired, I probably have even received some notifications on my phone that I have not checked yet, and yet, did I do anything to improve myself, improve the conditions of my family, my community, my world? The irony in writing about action is not that writing is a form of inaction. Writing is also an action as much as delaying to write or not planning to write at all. As our actions are always context-dependent, what I seem to be finding out here is that to uncover universal laws that will govern each and every choice made, or each and every action or non-action, seems futile.
However, falling into the spell of a lack of awareness of one’s ability to act certainly gets us no closer to finding the golden recipe for conquering all our existential doubts. If we cannot always be assured of moral, just, successful action, we can at least make a sincere effort to remind ourselves, as often as we can in the flow of moments, of what we have the power to choose, what our options are in any given situation, and what action or inaction will move us closer to a communion with what our goals as a living collective of thinking, feeling, dreaming, loving, sentient beings ought to be.
As writing this essay has so far been a solitary activity, I end here by pondering to what extent my action can be considered worthwhile if it exists in a political vacuum, that is, away from the world of such sentient beings. That is why, when I move back to opening up a social media screen, hit copy and paste, and submit to my (m)eager audience online, I will be finding out more of the worth of words, shared with like minds (are any of us really that different?…To be determined).
No comments:
Post a Comment