Balaji Prasad
By Balaji Prasad
“He who walks in the middle of the roads gets hit from both sides.” ~ George P. Schultz
Life is a continually evolving puzzle. It is literally a maze!
Amazing Maze
And, since you are inside the maze and cannot see over the walls around you, you need to make your best guess at the next step in your journey. It is possible that you will venture in a direction that brings you to a dead end. But this happens only once! – when you cease to live. This is so because you are dealing with an infinite maze that isn’t set in stone: it decides its next move, responsively, based on what you do on your turn in this unbounded game. It doesn’t have a mind that is entirely its own, much like the other human beings around you: they often do what they do, depending on what you do.
The bad news, if you want to call it that, is that you must keep playing the game. “You can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave,” as the Eagles profoundly observed about their Hotel California. When you stop playing, everything stops. No maze, no music, no nothing. Silence.
So, you might as well enjoy the game and the challenges that it throws at you. There is no choice about engaging versus not engaging; the part of you that lies under your cognitive “see-level “will continue to deeply engage with the game even if you fool yourself into thinking that you are sitting out the game.
All that is fine, but how do you decide which move to make in this game of 4D chess between yourself and reality when there are so many possibilities? Can you employ any heuristics – any rules of thumb?
Opportunity Costs
It is relatively straightforward. If you do X, then you cannot do Y. If you decide to read A Tale of Two Cities, you cannot read War and Peace at the same time. You can, though, as long as it is not simultaneously. You can read a bit of this, and a bit of that, and a bit of this again, and so on. That is an option too.
Options! Aka “opportunities”
As the roads fork in front of you, spreading out like an octopus’s tentacles, you pause and survey the landscape, as far as your eye can see. And, as far as your mind can see. This is the dangerous part, though, for an eager and grasping mind can see much further than the humble eye can, even seeing wispy, non-existent paths between the paths.
From Shining See to See
A road opens in front of me,
Then another … and ‘nother … yet ‘nother … and ‘nother!
There’s one too many opportunity,
And when Self’s installed as ship’s rudder,
Many more appear in drunk reverie:
I’ve gone from See to Shining See,
To universe that cannot be!
It’s time for a triage. “Do I go on this one, or on that?” you ask yourself, overcome with anxiety and doubt. “And how do I know whether a path is a path at all, or whether it is a stray mirage spun up by my infinite imagination?”
Mirages: “Whoppertunities”
Can you tell an opportunity from a “whoppertunity” (a huge lie)? You can, but it will be impossible if you are intoxicated. With your Self, that is. For your Self may bring with it some intense fears and desires that power the spin-ups of illusory paths and futures. Also, the Self is known to be not too particular about the truth, and doesn’t mind specious logic and wordplay of the kind that lawyers and politicians are wont to engage in. So, anything can be anything, and what you see can be what you wish to see, as your mind does voodoo on real things in the real world to make them shinier – or more terrifying – objects than the ones that actually exist.
The only way out of the Shining See is to see. And you can only truly see if you see the seer, and the state of intoxication that the seer is in. And to take what is “seen” with a huge grain of salt.
Whoppertunities can be dangerous, and so you do want to do your best to avoid them; one avoidance tactic is to distrust an intoxicated seer altogether, letting things flow where they flow, instead.
Opportunities, on the other hand are useful but not equal to one another. Taking one incurs the cost of not taking some other one, which may have been a better one. May the best choice win, once you get the lie of the land. Or you avoid the lies of the land!
Balaji Prasad is an IIT/IIM graduate, a published author, SAT/ACT Online and in-person Coach, and K-12 Math Tutor at NewCranium. [email protected]
