AARP had an interesting book review of Michael Ondaatje’s new book, Divisadero, that leaves me thinking about how the past affects not only the future but also how we experience the present. Based on the review, it sounds like a well-written and thoughtful yarn. I will pick up a copy at the airport.

The premise of the book reminds me of a provocative question we used to ask in the 70s when the focus was on ‘being here now’ and ‘going with the flow’. The question was:

The point being that most of us fill up our future by replaying old tapes from the past live over and over again.

Anyone who has done any self-reflection or read any psychological theory will know this idea isn’t new. Most of our conventional wisdom and our contemporary worldview is based on the past ‘determining’ the future in an unending succession of causes and effects. Any decent biography, legal argument and most, if not all, psychological analysis is based on this assumption. No matter what it is we’re trying to understand, we can only grasp it if we understand ‘the cause’.

Unfortunately, this view of life blinds us to the fact that no matter how well informed or complete our understanding of the causes of anything may appear to be, there will always be another point of view. History, as any professor will tell you after a few drinks, is just a story, an interpretation of ‘reality’. And the story frequently changes, sometimes in radical and dramatic ways—good guys become villains, truth becomes superstition—depending on whether we are a scientist or a Buddhist monk, what mood we’re in, and sometimes even what we had to eat for breakfast.

This doesn’t mean that our interpretation or worldview is trivial. It is, after all, ‘our reality’. It just means that whatever we think, believe or observe is valid…but it’s neither true nor false. Our view of causality (or anything else for that matter) is made up of our individual assessments, judgments, explanations and reasoning. So any connections we make between events and their causes are neither true nor false as well. As we get older, time and perspective grant us the wisdom to accept that our view is simply our point of view and to realize that it isn’t any more or less legitimate than someone else’s point of view. We become more tolerant of different opinions and more compassionate for others.

I hope Ondaatje sells a bunch of books. I imagine that most folks will buy the idea that his protagonist’s life was shaped when she was a teenager. Personally, I think she just got stuck (like most of us do) in an old story. I admit I’ve bought into a few stories myself and allowed them to influence my life. It’s taken me quite a while to realize there are no absolutes when it comes to understanding causes and effects and that we can transform our relationship to the past at any moment.

One piece of wisdom that I’m personally committed to is the idea that we always have a choice about how we experience our lives at any moment. Happiness is a choice—and so is suffering. If we don’t like the way we are or the way the world is, if we don’t see any possibilities or interesting challenges in our lives, then we can change the story.

After all, at then end of the day, our life story will just be a recounting of the choices we made along the way.