Heroes Not Zombies

There’s a stretch of coastline about an hour directly west of here. It’s known as “La côte sauvage” – the wild coast. It’s beautiful but a bit dangerous. There are rip tides and ever changing flows within the Atlantic Ocean which can trap and carry off a swimmer.

This photo captures something of that unpredictability. If you look at the lines of the breaking waves you can see the water is arriving from at least three different directions at once, and there are layers of water running in several directions.

Actually, I think life is like this. There are forces, attractions, repulsions, triggers and stimuli influencing us from multiple origins in every waking moment. We are complex creatures, we humans. And the world we live in is complex too. That’s why I doubt simplistic analyses and confident predictions.

Human life cannot be reduced to “cause and effect”, to “rationalism”, to “measurements”, “categories” and “data”. Life is full of surprises and every single experience emerges within multiple contexts with us responding, mostly unconsciously, to an almost infinite number of factors.

Somehow, that makes life all the more beautiful, all the more mysterious, all the more engaging……