The Theory of Pings!

Imagine that you-- the vast sum of your decisions, thoughts, sentiments, and cognitive processes that make up the brain's biochemistry that is ultimately YOU -- as a pinball in a pinball machine. The player who starts the game and flips the flippers sending the pinball flying is the driving force that guides us, call it whatever you will -- consciousness, desire, free will, God, nihilism, the machine elves, etc. But from the moment you were born a.k.a the moment that you entered this game of pinball, your life has been a series of actions or events that make up one large, stretched out event that is a game of pinball. Like a pinball, you are constantly bouncing around the machine and each time you hit one of the bumpers that go "ping!" you are shot off in a completely different direction only to go forth and hit another bumper and "ping!" off in a different direction. The pinging continues until the pinball gets sunken in the pit and the game is over. All of this is analogous to your life.

Just as you are born into this world you are shot off like a pinball in a pinball machine. Action or will determine where you go and every time something happens in your life it's like that little pinball hitting a bumper and going "ping!" BUT there's a catch. All of your decisions that have made up your personal narrative are an interdependent sequence of events that could not have existed without each and every "ping!" having occurred. In other words, because you did something that one time it led you to do another thing that next time. It's a classic butterfly effect of "pings" sending you off toward other "pings" and so on until you die.

SO if you stop and try to think way back down the line -- back to that one influential "ping" that sticks out in your mind -- that one that shaped who you are -- you may wonder what your life would look like now if it hadn't happened at all. And then you may find yourself asking questions like what rabbit hole you may have gone down if it had gone down differently and if a different "ping!" had sent you off on a different life path with different life acquaintances and different life happenings. Or if you'd even be the same person. Yet the remarkableness of how you came to be who you are stands as a testament to the living masterpiece of that combination of pings that got you to where you are now. You are nature's own artwork individualized by your experience -- a mirror reflection of a cosmic mosaic. And for those fortunate enough to still be playing the game, that pinball is still tumultuously flying around in that machine headed for the next "ping!"