No Deus to Ex Machina

Even the renegade Light Yagami obtained his power through the generosity of the gods.

But there is no Deus to Ex Machina.

Fate exists.  There is only one path to my future, but it happens to be too occluded to see right now.  That path depends on who I am.  I create my fate.  Even if it can only be one way, the way it turns out depends on how strong I am, how compassionate I am, how skillful I am.  My actions depend on the interaction between my desires and my ethics.

I'm bound to freedom, and that freedom is bound to turn out one way exactly, if simply because one cause cannot lead to two outcomes at once.

"The future is a constant in a world of free will
but if we are all predestined, a future variable."
~Owen Pallett, in A Man With No Ankles

I am not yet strong enough to obtain the skills and knowledge that I need.  Not as quickly as I originally wanted to obtain it.  The rigor with which I studied and worked up until spring break was too much for me.  I couldn't keep going, and now I've been recuperating in the ways that I know how.  I've done a pretty good job getting myself back to good health, in whatever kind I wasn't.

Now I'm reexamining everything I've been doing.  Putting my actions into a new light - one that also shines on the various things that would make me stronger, make the path towards my fate more clear, and ways to make my path a real one.

I've come to realize that, given the megalomaniacal proportion of my plan to engineer land-dwelling animals that can use language to communicate with each other and humans, there's really only one thing that I need to do:  start.  I only need to create a niche that will be filled out by the vast amount of people who want to contribute to the worthy goal.  There is an ethical impetus to make this the world we live in.  Among such a vast human population, there are plenty of personal motives for doing it, too.  Once it becomes a field, it will absolutely be populated by plenty of bright minds until it finds fruition.

And there's my new goal.  Although beginning a project is immensely less ambitious than finishing it completely, it is logically necessary.  And given what I know about human behavior and the progress of society, I have faith that its completion is the natural corollary to its inception.

So there it is:  the biggest hurdle, the one that requires the power of a god, is to change reality, not to extend it.  The machine will continue to operate the way it always has.  Operating outside of the machine is part that's impossible; it just so happens that operating outside of the machine is completely within my reach.

Or, should I say, within the reach of a stronger me.  The me that exists once I have trained and studied and molded myself into a capable, wise man.  One whose existence I so desperate covet.  I must steel myself to the challenges ahead, sensitize myself to the reasons I push onward, and precisely make myself fit for the specific roadblocks to my ambitions.  I must expand my mind and be more erudite than before.  I must hold dear my dream and take steps towards actualizing it.

In the past couple weeks, I've given myself time to think and postulate some of those steps.  Instead of drowning myself in coursework, I've been studying the world around me, the world of ideas that isn't covered in my academic studies, and trying to innovate.

I may still be in the brainstorming stage, but I daresay I am rather excited for the plans I've come up with so far.  I know for a fact that I can help heal the world:  because if I can heal myself, then nothing is irredeemable; if I can strengthen myself to be who I want to be, then there is no limit to the potential of people or society.