Chapter 5: A or B — The Choice of Fate: Disjunctive Contingency
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Hello everyone. This is Akira.
Imagine this.
That tense moment when you stood at a major fork in your life.
**・Stay at your current company, or take the leap and start your own business.
・Marry this person, or break up and walk a new path.
・Continue living in familiar Tokyo, or move to the countryside.**
“You must choose one side and completely abandon the other.”
When we face such a no-escape either-or choice, we feel an indescribable loneliness and pressure, don’t we?
But everyone, that very “pressure” is actually the highest and most precious proof that we are living in this world with free will.
The Drama Created by an Inescapable “Framework”
The “most simple ‘what a surprise!’ (categorical contingency)” and
the “conditional just-by-chance of ‘if ~ then’ (hypothetical contingency)” that we discussed up to the previous chapter
were, so to speak, events that suddenly arrived from the outside.
However, this “A or B — the fateful choice of only one (disjunctive contingency)” is a drama that involves the deepest part of our soul.
Kuki first presents the cold rule of “thinking about the fundamental structure of this world (metaphysics).”
“Today is either sunny, or it is not.”
There is no middle ground here.
In life, there inevitably exists a severe framework of “you cannot choose both; if one is correct, the other disappears.”
We are bound by this iron rule and desperately try to choose the correct answer.
But the true miracle is born precisely because that “framework” exists.
The “Future You Did Not Choose” Makes the Present Shine
Everyone, the most beautiful truth Kuki discovered is here.
Precisely because there is the severe condition of “A or B,” when you agonize and choose “A,” and there encounter unexpected happiness or opportunities, that joy transforms into a “gift of fate” that goes beyond mere luck.
Why? Because behind that happiness, the “future B that was not chosen and disappeared” is always accompanying it.
“If at that time I had chosen the other side, this emotion I feel now would have been 100% absent.”
It is precisely this tension that makes the reality right in front of us begin to radiate a dazzling light of contingency.
That “Hesitation” Is the Birth Cry of Freedom
Kuki gently tells us that this contingency makes us feel “freedom.”
Hesitating between A and B, suffering, and finally taking a step forward yourself.
In the very moment of that decision, we come to know that we are not “machines moved by someone else,” but “free beings” who create a new world with our own will.
Even if the result of the choice turns out to be unexpected, it is a “truth” that belongs only to you — something that did not exist in a calculated, boring future.
Everyone, the path you chose while hesitating is a “miracle route” that no one else but you attracted.
There is absolutely no need to regret “which one was the correct answer.”
Because you chose it, that path became the correct one.
Turning Life’s Choices into Blessings
Please look back a little on your day today.
From the lunch menu, to the words you spoke to someone important, or even a major future decision.
We have passed through countless “A or B”s and stand here now.
If right now you are standing still because of some choice.
Please gently regard that hesitation not only as “suffering,” but as “important preparation for receiving a gift named contingency from now on.”
“Whichever I choose, there awaits a beauty of contingency that only I can encounter.”
Just by believing that, the steps with which you open the heavy door of life should become a little more proud and light.
In the next chapter, we will enter the “mysterious connection between contingency and ‘nothingness’” that Kuki digs into even more deeply. Please look forward to it!
Akira
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