There are a few questions that have kept freshmen college students up into the wee hours of the night around their campfire or their beer or their coffee for millennia: Is there one or are there many? Is there an objective reality? Do we have free will or is everything predetermined?
It's been nearly a millennium since I was a college freshman, but I still find myself pondering on such things as I am trying to drift off to sleep. (Cue Puck.) And just last night a much younger friend asked me whether I thought we had free will. I evaded answering him by saying that I had been thinking of making a blog post on the question, and here's that blog.
Such thoughts always remind me of one of the dozen or so days I can remember from being in the first grade, when first I found myself a 'freshman' of sorts. My favourite activity in the first grade was what Miss Wilson called 'coloring'. when she passed out big sheets of newsprint and we got to 'color' whatever we wanted with our little box of Crayola crayons.
Only now do I think I begin to understand why I liked coloring best. It was one of the few times when we had, to my six-year old's eyes, a sheet of large paper without lines. Most of the time we had to use BlueHorse notebooks with solid lines for large letters and dotted lines for small letters and spaces between each line of our carefully printed words, which I managed no less sloppily nor with better spelling than I do now.
But I think equally important was that coloring was one of the few activities we could do on our own. Everything else was in groups. I had been reading for three years, exploring with my beloved encyclopedia a world far beyond the one On Cherry Street. Group work was boring. Coloring was one of the few times during the day when I was free.
I still remember vividly my embarrassment the day my grandfather visited and Miss Wilson asked me to recite the alphabet. I did of course know my ABC's, but I did not want to do such 'baby stuff' in front of my grandfather. (I learned many years later that the reason my grandfather visited my first grade class, something he never did after I was 'promoted', was that he and Miss Wilson were having an affair. I still thought things happened that were about me.)
The most vivid memory I have of the first grade, however, was the day when we didn't color. As the time for the fina; bell approached, I timidly lodged the first of what would become many complaints against the shackles of education. 'But Miss Wilson,' I blurted, as we got out some boring reader or speller when it was only thirty minutes to the bell, probably without even raising my hand, I was so affronted, 'we haven't colored.' Her response was terrifying: 'We can't color every day, Dale.'
Whether what happened next is a true memory from that day or if I have added it as I have rewritten my life to make me the hero, I don't know. But in my own private heroic saga, I thought, 'I can.' And I have in different ways tried to color every day since
It was a minor act of rebellion, but one that has often comforted me. There have been periods of my life when I have made very elaborate journals with colors and pictures and special bindings.
More often of late I do my coloring on one of my series of tablet computers that I love, freeing me from a bag of pens and markers and bits of paper and glue sticks.
Sometimes I have gotten all nostalgic for the old days of smelling the markers and licking the glue off the tips of my fingers and tried paper again for a few days, but I always end up just photographing those attempts and returning to the 21st century.
And very often, I confess, I am lazy as fuck and I just use a journaling app, which lets me add some art work--some bit of coloring--of my own but which I often just accompany with a photo from my smart phone, which has pretty much replaced that old box of Crayolas.
But. And it's a big 'but'. It is very easy for small, repeated acts that were once rebellious to become a comforting crutch, a numbness (Cue Pink Floyd) which lets me ignore situations which are much more limiting to my freedom. Or, if I don't ignore them, I ignore that there's only a short time until the bell will ring and there will be no more time for any activities. The big example of this in my own life was marriage. It was wrong for me first because I am gay, and being married to a woman, even a beautiful and talented and kind woman, was just wrong in every way. But I colored. I made pottery until the numbness had set in. After I, finally, was divorced, leaving a trail of havoc behind me, because saying one is sorry changes nothing, I immediately entered a marriage-like relationship with a man, a beautiful and talented and kind man. It was only when he asked me to marry him that I realized that I really preferred solitude. But I said I would think about it, and I colored, making graphic art and such as the numbness set in. Finally he realized before I did that my heart preferred a big sheet of news print to a neat notebook with lines and set me loose. I like to think that there was less damage left behind that time.
Now, as I finally get towards the end of this ramble, I realize that it has done nothing to answer the question of free will versus determinism. I thought I was making choices, even when I made foolish choices. But of course the hardcore Calvinists out there will just say that those choices were predetermined, so, duh. What I have found valuable about my daily coloring--I even have somewhere a Deviant Art account called The Daily Crayola--is that at best it helps me notice the choices I am making. The much younger friend who asked me about free will also asked me what I would like to change about my life, what I would like to do differently in the at least near future. I described what must have seemed to him like a very boring routine day, and said that I didn't see it changing much in the future except that I will spend more time at the beach as the days become longer.
I no longer hope to make a big impact on the world, but as I look at things that make big impacts on the world, I find bomb craters to be as prevalent as the iPhone, so perhaps it's better that I was kept in check, especially when I was younger and angrier. I have come to convince myself that even if I hadn't married, even if I had gone to school in New York rather than Chicago, even if I had kayaked to Alaska rather than to Olympia, or down the Amazon rather than down the White, I would, had I survived, probably have a very similar routine to what I do now. It is a routine which allows me to explore new thought and discoveries from new people every day, people whose lives make group activities much more exciting than reading On Cherry Street, people whose ideas are as close as my bookmarks bar, limited only by my own editing.
I still color every day. My palette is augmented far beyond the eight choices in that first box of Crayolas, even if my talent isn't.
What, if anything, has changed over the years, is that in my second (or third of fourth (Cue your gentle poke, gentle reader, at my childishness.) childhood I am almost always aware that the clock is ticking ever closer to the last bell.
