A Case for Grace

The sun rises, and the sun goes down.

The earth turns and tilts, but never leaves its orbit.

Waves crash against the shoreline, and then they recede back into the ocean.

Day in and day out, we consign ourselves to routine.

We believe so firmly that today, that next week, that next month, that next year, will follow the same pattern as its former counterpart. It’s a pattern we can use as a frame of reference for the rest of the chaos of life that pervades us. It’s predictable—until it isn’t. The reality always is that today, the earth, and the sun is never quite that same as it was yesterday, or whatever pattern it seems to repeat on. Everything is always shifting in ways we cannot observe or comprehend, and there will inevitably come the day when the sun will exhaust its fuel and cease to rise, a day when the earth is shrouded in darkness or viciously fragmented into pieces by a meteor that had begun its slow journey millions of years ago, a day when there are no waves and no ocean, and everything that we understand as the world around us—our sense of time, our sense of place, our sense of what it means to live—seems to fall apart.

Perhaps the largest disconnect between human nature and the universe we reside in is that we wake up day after day with a presumption that nothing has changed, when in reality, everything has. In neuroscience, this theory is known as predictive coding; we are so engrossed into the stories that we’ve told ourselves, so captivated and convinced by themes, motifs, and patterns that they quite literally shape our perception of the world around us, despite the entropy and the chaos that perpetually pervades us in ways we're either wired to ignore or unable to observe in the first place.

But perhaps the most nefarious aspect of predictive coding is not merely that every day will be the same, but even more so our proclivity to believe that we will come out each day being the same as well. The truth that so many changes happen to us in between the moments that we actually realize it. In between these moments of saying, “you’ve changed” or “I’ve changed," when was the actual literal moment someone changed?

Seneca said,

“we do not suddenly fall on death, but advance towards it by slight degrees; we die every day. For every day a little of our life is taken from us”

In much the same way, we do not suddenly become changed, as we might like to think about it; we are changing in every moment. Because we are an inextricable part of this wayward and incomprehensible universe, we are equally part of the entropy and the chaos that incessantly shapes our reality.

Every miniscule event that we experience or observe, either enriches or deteriorates our minds.

Every fragment of emotion we feel—the joy, the suffering, and everything in between—shapes our heart.

Every ounce of food and drop of water that enters our body literally becomes our body.

In every moment, we are dying.

In every moment, we are changing.

And the corporeal body gradually dies to the inexorable current of time, and our identity—who we are in this strange mental construct of ours—is ever changing, ever dissipating into the whirlwind of our circumstances.

Who you are now becomes who you were by the second.

It’s easy to realize these changes in the self, especially so if we are mindful enough to realize it without being pried from our complacency, but it is entirely a different challenge to see it in others. And so this is my case for grace: to treat everyone that you know as if they were a stranger; approach your friends, your family, and your coworkers with humility, providing them with the benefit of the doubt—to come to every interaction without the crass assumption that they were the same person you’ve always assumed them to be, and instead with a hopeful vision, to merely desire to learn who someone is, at that very moment despite the fleeting nature of time, and not let every interaction be imbued by who they were. This is why I choose to forgive, to not completely give up on others, and to love; it is because I know that who you are now is not who you will be tomorrow. And who you are tomorrow is not who you will be the day after that. I don’t need to wait for the moment you’ve changed, as if it was a checkbox you suddenly ticked off as complete or a switch you flicked on or off, to believe in you, to show grace and kindness to you, to love you.

Indeed, our past experiences help to inform us about the probability of certain events occurring. But we cannot reduce our interactions with one another to a cold calculus of probability of merely how someone might act; we cannot navigate life making the crass presumption that every situation is always exactly the same, that everyone is always exactly the same, or that you are always exactly the same, when the very essence of the world around us is ever-changing. If we are not vigilant, this mentality can malign our perceptions of one another to constant preemptive judgments that ultimately corrupt our ability to treat each other with fairness, justice, and temperament. No amount of intuition or raw utility to be found in predictive coding can allow us to circumvent the need to communicate with clarity, honesty, and humility with others in conversation, in the present moment.

And so this grace is an invitation to fate—to embrace the fact that if things aren’t right at this very moment, because the universe we live in constantly changes, and we constantly change, it may very well be that things will inch towards being right, day by day. It might be that any one of these days in the future that I return to you, be it next year, next week, tomorrow, or perhaps even today, we can together wholeheartedly embrace the new reality that’s been given to us in that very moment.

To all the people that once inhabited a place in my life and no longer—I hold not a modicum of bitterness. Only hope—hope that for any way either of us have failed, the universe has changed us or will change us in some way, for the better.