L'Agent Provocateur

So My Therapist Says he was sorry for his choice of words about "this situation". He started to explain, at length, how this and that might have played into it. I stopped him cold. No apologies needed.

I appreciate the role of provocateur. It's no crime, in my book, to push buttons if you're willing to stand there and endure the fruits of your labor. There's no malice in that. I explained that it had been many years since I'd even thought of many of those issues, having tucked them away in the history book. To revisit that time and those thoughts and decisions and all that flowed from them...that was good for me. I'm not weaker for having made that trip. Indeed, it strengthened me.

We talked, oddly enough, about whether or not there is A Plan. He thinks there might be. Everything happens for a reason. There are no coincidences. All that stuff. I grew up with The Plan. I believed in The Plan for a long, long time. Now, I'm not so sure of The Plan. I told him that I think this life is more likely a web of consequences - some good, some not so good, some downright tragic.

For the billions of people who make trillions of decisions every day, it's like the concentric rings from a stone tossed in a pond. A trillion stones. Each one's waves impact the others' and it's hard to tell what caused any given ripple. Einstein said that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, I think. So every time something positive occurs, a negative balances that somewhere in someone's life. Things might seem to come out of the blue. I think they just come out of the balance. Good God. I think I'm an Accidental Buddhist.

It would be hard if I thought that any of this was The Plan. That would be a plan that sucks ass. I'd like to speak with the author of that plan. She/he needs a new hobby or, perhaps, a Plan Seminar on how to design The Plan with a little less drama and a lot more entertainment. But like I said, I don't much buy the Plan Theory. I think we all make decisions, the consequences of which ripple outward - for better or worse - touching people we may never know. The only way to avoid it is to head for a bunker and never interact again. And I refuse to go down that easily. My ripples are going to be rolling out for a while to come. And I'll continue to get rolled by a few I didn't see coming. Sondheim would call that Being Alive, I suppose.

So, no apologies. No plan. He's grown a goatee now, My Therapist. I noticed. I said so. I think I looked at him differently. That's probably not the right thing to do. When we shared our mutual appreciation for healthy provocation, I joked that I was going to pay him one last time and then he was taking me to dinner. He knows, I'm sure, that I wasn't joking all that much.

I didn't get dinner. It probably wasn't in The Plan.