Returning to an Unfinished Question
An entire year has passed since I published the seventh part of this essay. At the time, I had been writing each part in relatively quick succession, letting the question at the end of one lead me into the next. Then… I stopped. I also stepped away from all social media, and it has been glorious! Life, thank goodness, pulled my attention elsewhere, just as the online world began to feel less like a place for sustained thought than an algorithm for manufacturing distraction. But that doesn’t really get to the heart of why the final part remained unfinished for so long.
The deeper reason is that I have changed. Perhaps not so completely that I reject everything that I had previously written. Much of it still feels true. But I am certainly no longer the same person who wrote the first seven parts of this essay. And returning to it has required more than picking up where that prior version of me had left off.
Some of the arguments now seem too certain, some incomplete. Others feel more important than I realized at the time. To finish the essay with the outline that I had originally planned would have required pretending that the intervening year had not revised my perspective as much as it did. And yet, returning to it now with a changed perspective – and allowing that change to alter the ending – feels much more faithful to the inquiry itself. The freedom to begin again is part of what agency means to me.
Others might imagine agency as correlated with consistency: having the willpower to choose a position and hold to it. Sure, there is value in commitment. But a rigid attachment to a former understanding can also become a subtle refusal to participate in reality. The point is not to force the person we were to agree with the person we have become, but rather to let our present-self enter into an honest conversation with our past.
A new friend recently described confronting something similar while returning to an older essay of her own. That conversation gave me the nudge I needed (thank you). Perhaps the distance I felt from this unfinished piece was not a reason to abandon my original inquiry, but rather part of its answer.
And this inquiry was never merely intellectual for me. More than thirty years ago, in my adolescence, my sense of home began to shift dramatically. Along with it went much of my trust in the people around me, in the world, and eventually in myself. The philosophical question of whether life had meaning became entangled with a far more immediate experience of despair.
When I first encountered the idea that free will might be an illusion, I found it strangely relieving. If every thought and action arose inevitably from causes beyond our control, then perhaps nothing was ultimately anyone’s fault. Perhaps I didn’t have to carry the weight of a life that felt as if it were falling apart. But relief slowly hardened into resignation. You see… if no one could have acted differently, then nothing could truly change. If every apparent choice was only the unavoidable consequence of what came before, then possibility itself began to feel theatrical. Determinism became fatalism, and fatalism became nihilism. I no longer cared whether or not I possessed some abstract metaphysical form of freedom. By that point, I was wondering if there was any meaningful reason to continue living at all. And a life without choice, without any form of agency, began to feel about as meaningless as it could get.
Albert Camus was right when he wrote that,
“There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.”
Thirty years ago, I flirted with that ultimate end, but thankfully never seriously enough. Yet when I accidentally came up against the reality of death, I was startled to discover how afraid of it I still was. Strangely, that unexpected glimpse was close enough that the fear of it shocked something awake in me. In the aftermath, I made a private decision. I would live as though I had already died, and every moment that followed was time I had not expected to receive. Suddenly I felt more alive than I’d ever been. I felt a real sense of agency.
Nothing about the universe outside of me had changed. I had not solved the problem of free will, discovered a divine plan, or proven that life contained some objective meaning. But my relationship to existence had suddenly shifted. The same world appeared differently because I was now participating in it differently.
Although I could not permanently sustain the clarity I felt in that moment, I never entirely lost the memory of it either. The years that followed contained plenty of forgetting, fear, habit, remembering, forgetting again, anger, grief, joy, anxiety, and love. But the gift of that moment was that it left me with a critical intuition: even if human freedom is narrow, even if most of what moves through us is shaped long before we become aware of it, there remains some sliver of participation. And that sliver matters more than we realize.
This is why arguments against free will can never remain purely academic for me. I understand the appeal of the position that contemporary thinkers such as Robert Sapolsky and Sam Harris take related to the argument that abandoning free will can make us more compassionate. We did not choose our genes, our nervous systems, our childhoods, or the conditions that formed our first reactions. Recognizing that can soften blame. It can make us less eager to condemn others, and perhaps less eager to condemn ourselves. But I also know what can happen when that insight expands into a total account of human life. Compassion can survive determinism, but meaning may have a harder time.
This series began with the concept of AI and imitation, then we moved into determinism, emergence, attention, selfhood, discernment, and karma. Each stage may have narrowed the question about absolute freedom, but it demoted the lived experience and clear difference between being carried by a moment and participating in it. More than thirty years ago, I certainly didn’t “prove” agency, but I felt it. I discovered that even the smallest movement toward life could change what life became. That was only a sliver of agency. But a sliver is enough.
The False Choice Between Total Freedom and No Freedom
The difficulty about most arguments regarding free will is that they leave little conceptual room for a sliver. They present us with two choices, each absolute in their own way. Either we are sovereign selves, somehow standing outside the causal order and initiating action independently of everything that formed us, or we are passive machinery, carrying out instructions written by biology, history, and circumstance. The choice seems to be between total freedom or none at all. But this is a false dichotomy.
The first requires a kind of self I cannot find in experience: an uncaused author hovering above the body, untouched by inheritance, memory, relationship, or causation. The second requires me to treat the body as a mechanism through which causes merely pass, as though a human life were no different from a row of falling dominoes. One view grants us an impossible sovereignty. The other removes meaningful participation altogether.
But here is the thing: we do not need to establish ourselves as metaphysically independent beings in order to reject the conclusion that we are powerless automatons. We can admit how thoroughly conditioned we are without treating conditioning as the whole of what we are.
This is why I remain sympathetic to the views held by Sapolsky and Harris, even while I part company with their conclusions. Their account of human behavior contains a genuine moral gift. It reminds us that no one created the conditions from which they first encountered the world. And in a world like that, it becomes difficult to hold onto emotions like anger, hatred, or self-righteousness. Even simplistic blame feels inadequate. Compassion begins when we recognize how much of our life we have inherited before any choice was ever made.
Understanding the magnitude of our inherited circumstances does not mean, however, that our future is fixed by those circumstances. While greater understanding does not erase the cause, it does change our relationship to it. An emotion that rises in us can become an object that we can observe, interpret, and perhaps redirect. Or in Spinoza’s words,
“An emotion which is a passion ceases to be a passion as soon as we form a clear and distinct idea of it.”
This is close to what I mean by the sliver. We do not become free by escaping causation. We become freer by participating more consciously in how causation moves through us. Life metabolizes causation. It receives conditions, transforms them through its own organization, and returns something to the world. A stone, on the other hand, is altered by heat, pressure, and rain, but it doesn’t gather those forces into a response. Only life does that. Human beings do so with extraordinary complexity, carrying sensation, memory, imagination, interpretation, and relationship into what happens next.
For example, we may inherit fear, but fear does not have only one possible expression. It can become control or avoidance. It can also become caution, courage, preparation, or care. We may inherit pain, but pain can be transmitted, concealed, repaired, or turned toward the protection of others. None of these possibilities begins from nowhere. Each depends on conditions, capacities, relationships, and opportunities we did not fully create. Yet the differences among them are very real.
We do not choose the first movement in every response. The body tightens. Anger rises. An old story announces itself as fact. The urge to defend, please, withdraw, or strike back appears. Much of this occurs before reflection even enters the room. But sometimes the movement does not complete itself exactly as it has before. Sometimes we notice it. Sometimes another understanding joins it. Sometimes the fear remains, but courage participates too. That is not absolute freedom. But it is also not passive machinery.
Still, an important objection remains: if the organism, its awareness, and even its growing understanding are all physically caused, then in what meaningful sense is the organism doing anything? If every transformation occurs within the causal order, have we described agency, or skirted around it with fancy-sounding language?
Agency Exists at the Level of Life
The answer begins by changing the scale at which we are looking. If we search for agency among the particles that compose a body, we won’t find it. But that may tell us less about agency than about the limits of the search. We wouldn’t expect to locate a storm inside a molecule of water, a promise inside a neuron, or the purpose of a journey inside an atom of the traveler’s foot. Each depends completely on physical components, sure, but none is adequately described by listing those components one by one.
Jenann Ismael addresses this beautifully in her book, How Physics Makes Us Free. She states that:
“The right sort of complex processing really does give rise to something that is much more than the mere sum of influences – something self-formed and self-forming – whose internal organization then, in its turn, mediates the effect of any further influence on action.”
In other words, a person (or any living organism for that matter) is more than a collection of fundamental constituent particles. A person is an organized process extended through time: an embodied history capable of gathering information, learning from experience, imagining possibilities, forming commitments, and regulating behavior in relation to chosen ends. These capacities do not violate physics. Rather, they are among the things that matter can do when organized into a living being.
This gives us a better way to understand emergence. Higher-level realities are not imaginary simply because they depend on lower-level ones. A promise, for example, is not an illusion because it depends on neural activity, vocal cords, shared language, and social history. Its existence is relational and organizational. It carries obligations, alters expectations, and changes what people do. It has causal consequences at the level where promises exist.
The same is true of agency. It does not need to be let in the side door by indeterminism, conceptualized as an exotic quantum event inside brain neuron microtubules, or granted by an immaterial soul. Agency can be a real capacity of an organized living being, even though every part of that being remains physical. The earlier discussion of quantum mechanics helped loosen the image of the universe as a perfectly predictable clock, but unpredictability alone cannot give us freedom. A random event does not become a choice merely because no one could foresee it. Ismael offers a more useful shift: the relevant causes may operate at more than one level of description. The movement of particles is real, and so is the decision of the organized being those particles compose.
We should also not assume that agency resides exclusively with human beings. All forms of life display varying degrees of directed activity such as maintaining internal conditions, pursuing nourishment, avoiding danger, adapting to changing environments, learning, or even purposefully selecting among possible actions. While the reflective agency of human beings may be arguably more complex than the responsiveness of simpler organisms, we don’t know how far interior experience extends through the living world. Whether a cell, plant, or simple organism possesses anything that should be called consciousness or agency requires a much deeper inquiry than the conclusion of this essay can responsibly contain. However, I suspect I will return to it someday. For now, the more modest point is enough: agency begins to make sense at the level of organized life, where matter does not merely undergo change but maintains itself, responds to its surroundings, and participates in its own continuation.
Furthermore, embodiment is crucial to that organization. An agent never reasons from nowhere. For example, a tired body encounters a different range of possibilities than a rested one. A frightened nervous system interprets ambiguity differently from one that feels safe. Memory changes what the present means. Relationships create loyalties and obligations. An imagined future can even exert pressure on a decision long before it exists.
Antonio Damasio challenged the old assumption that reason could be separated cleanly from this embodied field. As he wrote in Descartes’ Error,
“It is not only the separation between mind and brain that is mythical: the separation between mind and body is probably just as fictional. The mind is embodied, in the full sense of the term, not just embrained.”
The damage or absence of systems that connect feeling, bodily state, and judgment does not leave behind a more pure state of rationality. Those systems are precisely what give us the capacity to decide wisely. Feeling is more than simply interference introduced into thought. It helps establish what matters enough to be considered at all.
This is one reason I believe that we are still a ways off from artificial intelligence possessing anything that resembles human-like conscious agency. Current systems can model histories, infer preferences, compare futures, generate reasons, and speak persuasively about hunger, fear, love, pain, and mortality. But fluency does not demonstrate interior participation. The difference is not simply that an agent has a biological body while a machine does not. It’s that the agent acts from within a situated existence that can be sustained or damaged, connected or isolated, fulfilled or betrayed. A living being is not merely in the world; it is at stake in the world.
Still, locating agency at the level of a living entity leaves another problem unresolved. A person exercising their will might appear to be an organized whole from the outside, yet anyone who has struggled with a decision knows that the interior is rarely governed by a single, sovereign voice. Beneath the grammatical simplicity of the word “I” lies a shifting plurality of impulses, memories, loyalties, fears, desires, bodily states, inherited values, and competing interpretations.
The Chooser Is Not a Monarch
Sometimes we speak as though a single ruler sits somewhere inside us, receives information, evaluates it, and then issues a decision. But experience rarely feels that orderly. One impulse tells us to speak; another to keep quiet. One wants closeness; another begins preparing an exit. By the time conscious thought announces, “I have decided,” it can feel more like relief than a sovereign edict.
But these competing impulses are not separate entities housed in different compartments of the brain. Sorry to disappoint anyone still fond of the “lizard brain,” but the familiar story of an ancient emotional brain struggling against a newer rational one is a myth. Emotions are not fixed packages stored in a particular location and retrieved when summoned. They’re constructed in the moment as the brain integrates bodily sensation, memory, prediction, and context.
Because that construction happens so quickly, interpretation can feel indistinguishable from perception. Our hands clench, our shoulders tighten, and almost immediately the mind begins completing the picture. It assigns motives, predicts consequences, retrieves old evidence, and constructs a story about what is happening. Soon we are no longer noticing that we feel threatened; we are “certain” the other person is threatening us. Here’s the thing, though: the feeling might be real, but the story we build around it is rarely the entire truth. The key is to honor what the feeling may be telling us without accepting every conclusion the mind draws from it.
This is where the pause becomes valuable. We don’t need an internal verdict before we act. We don’t need every impulse reconciled, every motive purified, or every inner voice persuaded to vote the same way. What we need is enough room to recognize what we actually know and what the mind is adding. When we notice tightness in the chest, something important may be happening. But we do not yet know the full story, nor do we need to. We don’t know whether the present danger is as large as the past danger that it resembles. Most ordinary moments simply don’t require us to complete the story merely because uncertainty is uncomfortable.
Agency does not require unanimity within us. It requires enough space to act without mistaking the loudest interpretation for the whole truth. Some psychologists and spiritual traditions describe this as acting from a deeper sense of “Self” (with a capital S). But we don’t need to settle the metaphysics to recognize the feeling. We can understand the “Self” as shorthand for a more integrated state in which this becomes possible. It is not a new monarch replacing the impulsive one. Rather, it is the felt experience of allowing more of ourselves and more of the situation to remain available at once.
This integrated perspective may make agency more available, but it does not give agency direction. A more integrated Self creates room for choice. The pause interrupts the rush to complete the story, but it cannot answer the question of what deserves our participation.
The Sliver Is Not Only a Pause
The question of what deserves our participation shifts agency beyond the typical contrast of reaction vs. response. Most accounts of human action begin with something that has already happened. The world acts upon us, and we either react automatically or respond with greater awareness. This is important, but it leaves us perpetually downstream from events, improving our conduct within circumstances that have already been given. But human agency also moves in the other direction. We don’t merely meet what arrives. We have the ability to imagine what is absent.
We are storytellers in a particularly elaborate sense. We can gather the past into a narrative, project that narrative forward, and then reorganize our present behavior around a future that does not yet exist. Other animals might anticipate, plan, cooperate, and even shape their environments in remarkable ways. But human symbolic imagination extends these capacities across decades, institutions, moral commitments, fictional worlds, and lives we may never personally witness. We can be moved by an unwritten book, an unbuilt home, an unrepaired relationship, or a promise whose fulfillment lies years ahead.
Much of human culture begins this way: as something absent that nevertheless starts exerting influence on the present. A marriage can be repaired because two people begin acting toward a form of relationship that is not yet fully real. A boundary can be established because someone imagines a life no longer organized around the same wound. A parent can endure the repetitive labor of care because the child’s future participates in today’s choices. Artists continually work in relation to forms they can sense before they can articulate them. Institutions arise because groups of people agree to behave as though a shared possibility deserves structure, resources, rules, and protection.
None of these acts is simply a response to what has happened. Each introduces a possibility into the causal field and begins altering present conditions in its direction. This is where agency becomes more than self-regulation. Now, it’s no longer only about whether we can prevent anger, fear, habit, or inherited pain from completing its usual circuit. The question is whether we can participate in establishing a different pattern. The pause matters because it interrupts what has been. But agency becomes creative when the opening is given a direction.
By creative, I don’t mean unconstrained invention or the fantasy that desire alone can command reality. We do not create from nothing. Every act begins inside conditions we did not choose and must answer to facts that do not bend merely because we prefer another outcome. The unfinished future is not an empty canvas. It is a living situation, already crowded with other people, histories, limits, accidents, obligations, and forces beyond our control. Still, unfinished is not the same as fixed.
The sliver of agency is therefore not confined to choosing how we respond after the world reaches us. It also appears when we discern a possibility, commit ourselves to it, and begin shaping the conditions through which it might become real. We are not sovereign authors acting outside of causality. But neither are we only characters reading from a completed script. The fullest expression of agency is not merely choosing a better response to what has happened. It is participating in the creation of what happens next.
Bringing Something Into Being
The question, then, is what is worth bringing into being. That might sound grander than it needs to be. It does not require a heroic mission, a five-year plan, or a vision large enough to justify a motivational keynote. It may concern the quality of a single conversation, the atmosphere of a home, the work on a page, or the kind of person one is becoming through repeated choices. But however modest the scale, creation begins with something that does not yet exert a claim upon the present.
In his book, The Path of Least Resistance, Robert Fritz describes this in what he calls structural tension: the relationship between current reality and the result we want to create. One is what presently exists. The other is what we are choosing to bring into existence. The distance between them is not necessarily evidence that something has gone wrong. It is the structure through which action acquires direction.
This is very different from responding to the moment, which is a focus on how to “fix” our current situation. In that orientation, our actions remain organized around what we no longer want to exist. Creation asks something different of us. It requires that we look directly at the present conditions without confusing them with the whole range of what is possible. Then we must become specific enough about what matters that our attention, decisions, and resources can begin moving in its direction.
David Emerald describes a similar shift in his book, The Power of TED*. He describes it as moving from a reactive orientation into a creator orientation. This jumps over a potential midstep of the responsive orientation, but that jump provides wider possibilities. A reactive orientation asks primarily how to escape, defeat, or control a problem. A responsive orientation might activate a pause and allow us to address our problems with more poise and care. But it’s a creative orientation that asks what outcome is worth moving toward, given the circumstances that actually exist.
The phrase “given the circumstances” is important here. Creation does not begin by pretending reality is other than it is. We cannot deny real injury, injustice, limitation, or loss. For example, friendship cannot be repaired from an imaginary account of what has happened. Clear contact with reality is not the enemy of possibility. It is what makes meaningful action possible. At the same time, current reality cannot be allowed to dictate the entire future merely because it arrived first. What is true now establishes conditions. It reveals constraints, resources, damage, patterns, relationships, and consequences. It tells us where we are beginning. But it does not settle, by itself, what deserves to come next.
This realization has led me toward a further refined account of agency: agency is the capacity to encounter reality without denial, imagine something that does not yet exist, and participate in establishing the conditions through which it may come to be.
To be clear, this is not a form of wishing. It is not visualizing an outcome so intensely that the universe becomes “embarrassed” into delivering it. It is not a belief that every person can create whatever life they prefer, regardless of poverty, illness, oppression, accident, biology, or the freedom of other people. Reality is not a private manufacturing process, and the future is not raw material belonging to the strongest imagination.
Agency is more disciplined and more humble than that. It begins by telling the truth about present conditions. It requires discerning what matters rather than merely following or fleeing from what attracts or frightens us. It involves choosing a direction and then altering the behaviors, relationships, habits, commitments, and structures that influence what becomes possible. Finally, it requires allowing the world to answer, because the world is not inert. Our actions enter a field already populated by other causes, other wills, and consequences we cannot fully predict.
Consider an example I continuously learn from: parenthood. A parent who notices irritation and avoids speaking harshly has interrupted a pattern. That matters. But the deeper work is not merely suppressing irritation more successfully. It is choosing the kind of relationship being cultivated over years. Patience, honesty, boundaries, humor, repair, and attention are not isolated responses. They become conditions within which a child gradually learns what love, conflict, and belonging feel like.
A person in transition faces a similar task. The ending of a career, marriage, identity, or long-held plan may first require surviving the disorientation it creates. But regulation alone does not provide a new direction. Eventually, that person must begin arranging a life around what now matters, often before the shape of that life is fully visible. New relationships are formed. Old obligations are reconsidered. Time is used differently. The future first appears through changes that may seem almost trivial from the outside.
Even a boundary can be creative. It may begin as a response to harm, but its deeper purpose is not merely to stop what has happened. A boundary establishes conditions under which a different relationship might become possible, even if that relationship ultimately requires distance. It gives form to what will and will not be allowed to continue.
These examples reveal why resistance is not always contrary to creation. The child remains upset, habits return, people disagree. The old life does not politely dismantle itself merely because a new one has been imagined. But resistance provides information and shape. A river without banks loses its direction. A creative act without constraint remains fantasy.
The tension between what exists and what might exist can therefore be generative, but only if neither side is denied. Ignore present reality, and vision becomes delusion. Abandon the envisioned possibility, and reality becomes a prison built from whatever has happened so far. Agency holds both: an honest account of where we are and a chosen orientation toward what deserves our effort.
Although answering the question about what is worth bringing into being only initiates the process, it is a crucial first step. Then, the possibility must enter behavior, structure, and consequence. It must survive contact with facts that so often refuse to cooperate. It must be tested, revised, and sometimes relinquished. What is true now places real conditions on what can happen next. But it does not possess final authority over what can become. The rest depends on whether a possibility remains an idea within us, or whether we are willing to let it enter the world.
Agency Must Enter the World
Once a possibility enters the world, reality answers. Until then, it can remain internally coherent, protected from contradiction by imagination. But action exposes it to other people, unforeseen consequences, material limits, and facts we could not perceive from a distance. The imagined future meets a reality that has its own momentum.
That’s why practice is important. Because ideas don’t change a life until they alter how we participate in one. Meditation, movement, writing, therapy, conversation, and time in nature may each help under different conditions. But the form is less important than the movement beneath it: returning to what is actually happening, becoming less captive to the first interpretation, and creating enough space for a deliberate action to enter the world.
Eventually, awareness has to become consequential. We must decide what matters enough to move toward and take a step that changes something outside the mind. A possibility that never enters action may remain beautiful, but it does not yet participate in causation. But the step does not have to be dramatic. In fact, smaller actions often reveal much more than elaborate plans because they allow reality to answer sooner. We learn what the idea becomes when it encounters the actual world. Does the conversation open something or expose a deeper conflict? Does the new routine support the life we imagined, or does it collapse under conditions we ignored? Does the boundary create clarity, escalation, relief, or grief? Does the work communicate what we thought it did?
Reality answers every action, although not always in language, and rarely the way we expect. Sometimes the answer is resistance or surprise. The child does not calm down when we become patient. The honest conversation leaves both people more confused. The plan that appeared elegant produces an unforeseen burden. A structure created to solve one problem subtly generates another.
These responses do not necessarily mean the choice was wrong. They mean the choice has entered a relationship with conditions larger than our understanding. Mature agency includes the willingness to receive that answer without immediately defending the original intention. We acted from what we knew. Now reality has supplied new information.
To remain alive is to remain revisable. And revision is not weakness or indecision. It is what distinguishes participation from imposition. We can repair harm without pretending the original intention excuses it. We can adjust a plan without declaring the earlier effort wasted. We can continue when difficulty is part of the work, and stop when persistence has become attachment to an outcome that no longer serves us.
But revision can become its own refuge. Endless reconsideration sometimes protects us from the vulnerability of completion. We keep refining the sentence because publishing it would allow others to judge it. We continue analyzing the relationship because a decision would create loss. We leave every door slightly open so that no choice becomes fully consequential. However, remaining revisable does not mean remaining perpetually unfinished.
Sometimes agency asks us to release the work. Sometimes it asks for a definitive boundary, an ending, or the admission that a particular possibility has run its course. Completion does not mean the result is flawless or that nothing more could be learned. It means that, for now, the form has received what we can honestly give it. We allow it to exist apart from us and accept that whatever follows will no longer be fully ours to determine.
The movement is therefore neither a straight line nor an endless loop. We act from our current understanding. We let reality answer. We learn and adjust. We repair what needs repair, continue what still matters, and recognize when something has become complete. Then we begin again, not from the same place, but from what participation has taught us.
This may be how meaning enters a life as well. We often search for meaning as though it were a conclusion waiting to be reached: a final explanation that will settle why we are here and what our experiences amount to. But perhaps meaning is less like a conclusion and more like a relationship enacted over time. It is formed through what we attend to, what we care for, what we create, what we refuse, what we repair, and what we eventually release.
Choosing Without Owning the Outcome
To participate in meaning is not to possess it. Nor does participation grant us authority over what our actions finally become. This is the limit that any mature account of agency must accept: the future may be influenced by us, but it does not belong to us.
Agency can easily be confused with control because both involve intention. We form a picture of what should happen, act toward it, and begin measuring success by how closely reality conforms to the picture. When the result differs, we may conclude that we chose badly, did not try hard enough, or never had meaningful agency in the first place. But this assumes that freedom should include command over everything our actions encounter. It doesn’t.
We can choose an action, but we cannot command what that action becomes once it enters the lives of others. We can prepare the soil, plant carefully, and tend what emerges, but we cannot order the seed to grow. We can speak honestly, but we cannot determine whether honesty will be received as care, threat, liberation, or betrayal. We can raise children with attention and love without attempting to dictate the adults that they become. The inability to control the outcome does not invalidate agency. It simply describes its boundary.
For me, this has been one of the hardest distinctions of agency to live by. Strangely enough, I can accept uncertainty intellectually while continuing to organize myself around its elimination. I plan, explain, anticipate, and refine, hoping that sufficient understanding will protect me from surprise. Sometimes these efforts are useful; sometimes they conceal an old bargain: if I act correctly enough, perhaps reality will spare me from loss. Reality has never agreed to that bargain.
To act without owning the outcome requires a different kind of strength. It means choosing carefully while leaving room for the world to remain other than we imagined. It means holding conviction without converting conviction into entitlement. It means caring deeply about what we are trying to create while recognizing the obvious truth that other people retain their freedom, circumstances change, accidents intervene, and every living process develops beyond the intentions that began it. We are responsible for our participation, not sovereign over its result.
We remain accountable for what we notice, what we ignore, the conditions we help establish, and how we respond when consequences become visible. Surrender does not absolve us from repair. Humility is not an excuse for vagueness, inaction, or the spiritualized shrug that whatever happens was meant to be. We still have to choose, act, and answer for what our actions set in motion. But answering for an action differs from claiming dominion over its entire future. At some point, the work must leave our hands. Sometimes the most agentic action is relinquishment: the recognition that continued effort has become an attempt to dominate an outcome that will not, or should not, be ours to control.
Agency without surrender becomes control, and surrender without agency becomes resignation. Human freedom lives between them: choosing what deserves our participation, giving ourselves honestly to it, and then allowing reality to remain free. Lisa Feldman Barrett captures this essential distinction beautifully in Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain:
“Sometimes we’re responsible for things, not because they’re our fault, but because we are the only ones who can change them.”
And while we are not the sole authors of what comes next (reality gets final editing), we do remain responsible for the lines that are ours to write.
The Next Moment Remains Open
The lines we write are rarely written once. Most of us do not arrive at a defining insight and then live faithfully inside it forever. We glimpse something, organize our lives around it for a time, and then lose contact with it. The demands of ordinary life accumulate. Fear returns in more convincing forms. Old habits find new language. At least that’s what I’ve noticed is true for me.
More than thirty years ago, after breaking through the numbness I had been living inside, I decided to treat the life that followed as something unexpected. In my mind, the life I had assumed was mine had already ended. Every additional hour was unearned time. Every ordinary thing felt briefly restored to a strange sense of wonder. I had not discovered why life existed. I had changed how I was meeting it.
For a while, that was enough. But the clarity didn’t remain untouched. Life accumulated around it. Responsibilities grew. Relationships became complicated. Life filled with ambition, disappointment, joy, and grief, while familiar patterns of self-protection reemerged. I became invested again in particular outcomes and frightened by their loss. I tried to control what could not be controlled. I reacted from patterns whose origins I understood only much later. The world gradually became familiar again, and familiarity concealed its gift.
Still, the original insight never disappeared completely. What I encountered then was not an answer to the question of free will. Nothing had been proven. The universe had not disclosed its purpose, and the mystery that frightened me remained a mystery. But it no longer felt like an emptiness that had to be filled before I could live. It felt like something I could enter.
Perhaps that was the mistake all along: believing that freedom had to be settled before life could begin. We are here briefly, shaped by causes we did not initiate and participating in consequences we will never fully see. We receive a world already in motion. For a time, it moves through us and takes on a form that would not have existed in quite the same way without us.
We forget. We remember. We choose. We act. We learn. We begin again.