Went
biking a bit later than usual today, had a chore to do first. Wasn’t
sure what path to take and chose on the fly. As I went along, a bee
flew into my chest. It was a chance encounter; the bee apparently
was not coming at me with its stinger and no harm done to me, the bee
I’m not sure. Struck me that the odds of this happening – the
bee flying to that spot exactly as I entered it – were infinitesimally
small. Yet when it happened, the event became inevitable.
Everything that bee did that day and every decision I made led the
two of us to it.
The light leaving the sun all morning traveled
the 93 million miles to earth in around nine minutes by
our time. But as
photons don’t experience time, all of them arrived at every
spot they would ever be at the same moment, establishing a
universal and simultaneous now.
As the bee-human
encounter happened, it had already/always happened. Folks used to
call this fate: everything that happens was fated to happen. Yet
the reality we experience has a future that we enter through a
combination of factors including free will. We are conscious
of the passage of time and can project our decisions and actions
into a future that we can thereby affect, at least to some degree.
Reality seems to be a kind of entangled state in which everything
that will happen, or has happened, or is happening exists at the same
moment while yet still unfolding in “real time.” Pretty cool.
