And So It Goes

In "Slaughterhouse 5", Chaplain's Assistant Billy Pilgrim is kidnapped by Tralfamadorians, extraterrestrial aliens who can see in four dimensions and have already seen every moment of their lives. While they cannot change anything about their destiny, they can choose to focus upon any moment in their lives. All time is fixed, but each moment is instantaneously accessible, which means each moment basically exists forever.

As they do not understand free will, the concept of free will and change is hard for a Tralfamadorian to understand. They believe it to be a bizarre fiction of Earth, where individuals who cannot see in four dimensions need an explanation to why things happen. In this scenario, there is little incentive to live life well (however you choose to define well), for as long as each life has a few good moments to re-visit eternally, you could be eternally content.

Billy latches on to this belief, and he becomes "unstuck in time", experiencing past and future events. As he "travels" backward and forward in time, he relives occasions of his life, including his death. Billy does not have the control these alien’s possess, as he can not control his time travel or choose to remember only what he wants to choose, and he relives happiness as much as he relives sadness. Without free will, there is no time wasted on blame, guilt or punishment. Billy accepts that things happen as they happen and does not blame anyone for what he experiences in the war, for the death of his wife, or for...anything.

While I am sure the Tralfamadorians would disagree, our lives are a series of things, our minds playing a critical role in how our many experiences shape us. On the outside chance I won't run into any aliens who can teach me to focus for an eternity on one single thing, I choose to acknowledge I do not and cannot know what the future holds. We are who we are because of what we have done, intentionally or unintentionally, successfully or or through defeat. We attract and repel along the way, forces of physics and psychics, our most profound truths found unexpectedly through experience.

So it goes.