Oh William

Image: Leta Paine, Flickr

Here’s a conversation that’s stayed in my mind. A fictional conversation—from a novel by Elizabeth Strout¹ —but an intriguing one, nonetheless. William is talking to his ex, and he says:

But I have thought about this, Lucy, I have thought about this a lot, and I would like to know—really I would like to—when does a person actually choose anything? You tell me.

He continued,

Once every so often—at the very most—I think someone actually chooses something. Otherwise, we’re following something—we don’t even know what it is, but we follow it Lucy.

Let’s pause the conversation for a moment (already you have a sense of maybe why she left him), to consider two data points:

Home bakers keen to keep busy and fed during the lockdown have pushed demand for flour up 500 percent for one producer…’We’re running our mills 24 hours a day, seven days a week.’²

New Zealand is undergoing its biggest renovation in history as home improvement activity hit an all-time high throughout the pandemic. According to Ray White chief economist, Nerida Conisbee, the value of consents for alterations and additions to existing homes hit a record high of $1.8 billion in 2021.³

The question—the reason William and Lucy’s conversation stayed in my mind—is this: did those of us who got into sourdough during lockdown, or decided we really must renovate the bathroom, or whatever we did…did we really choose to do so, or—to William’s point—were we just ‘following something’?

I was thinking about the year before I left William (Lucy is telling us) how almost every night when he was asleep, I would go out and stand in our tiny back garden and I would think: What do I do? Do I leave or do I stay? It felt like a choice to me then.

It certainly felt like a choice to us then. We weren’t aware, in the moment, that everyone else was feeding a starter or looking at rain showers. We were doing our own thing. Right?

Patricia Williams published her journal recently. It’s a lovely book: I wish my Mum had written it. Between the Harbour and the Mountain, it’s called, and the subtitle is accurate: Reflections on the Ordinary and the Profound...

When I receive communion and I return to my seat, I feel my whole being caught up within a deep, deep mystery and I become aware of the mighty chain of events that has shaped what I am experiencing—the great exploding fireball and its bounty of chemicals and minerals now in our soil and now in the wheat and grapes that I consume and now in me.

According to quantum physics everything and everyone since the beginning of time is interrelated in a great web of interconnections, causes and effects.

I am convinced that everything and everyone is an undivided whole.

We’ve parked the car at the end of a track, just on the edge of the Ureweras, or in Fiordland or somewhere…and already we’re beginning to realise how easy it must be to get lost. A moment ago we were choosing a shower head. And now quantum physics?

After a moment I asked (Lucy talking), ‘Are you saying you don’t believe in free will?’

Google ‘free will’ and you’ll soon realise how deep in the bush we are. If there’s no such thing as free will—if we’re all just ‘following something’—then we can’t be held accountable for what we do: genetics made me buy the spa bath.

Let’s not go any further, or we really will be lost. Suffice to quote just the headline of a 2016 article in The Atlantic: There’s no such thing as free will, but we’re better off believing in it anyway.

In other words, (it seems to me), William is sort of right, and sort of wrong. At one level, we are all just stimulus and response: Patricia’s ‘great web of interconnections, causes and effects’. And yet we are capable of making choices and (it seems to Patricia) by making good choices, we can a difference in the world.

(Lucy) We are all mythologies, mysterious. We are all mysteries, is what I mean.

This may be the only thing in the world I know to be true.

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New Zealand squash player Paul Coll won a gold medal at the Commonwealth Games. Read my 2017 profile of Paul (for Sport New Zealand), here.

1. Oh William! (2021)

2. RNZ National Checkpoint 2.04.20

3. Ray White Real Estate website 21.02.22