What Is- And Isn't Written Yet.

 

The Story You Tell Is the Life You Live

Hope lives where the past stops deciding the future.

I’ve been thinking again about free will since my previous post, "Free Will Is Far From Free." Not in the way people usually argue about it, but how it actually shows up in a day, because whatever we believe about control, or choice, or how much of this is truly “ours”… there’s something more immediate sitting underneath all of it.

Something simpler.

Something harder.

There’s a growing body of thinking—people like Robert Sapolsky articulate it well—that what we call “free will” is far less free than we tend to believe. 

“By the time you’re making a decision, the reasons for it are already in place.”  —Robert Sapolsky

“And yet—this is where the story turns.”

Our reactions, our impulses, even the thoughts that feel most personal, are shaped by biology, experience, and context long before we’re aware of them.

And if you sit with that honestly, it can feel disorienting… until you realize that the point isn’t to fight that reality, but to understand what becomes possible when you stop pretending it’s something else.

But I don’t think the most useful response to that realization is resistance, or worse, resignation.

I think it’s acceptance—but not the passive kind. Something closer to what my friend, Adam Fiore, points to when he talks about “what is.”

Not as a concept- as a place, because “what is” doesn’t argue with reality.

What if I could always be ok with whatever is happening in front of me, regardless of what my mind has to say about it? In other words, what if I could always be ok with the immeasurable truth of what is?— Adam Fiore

It doesn’t ask whether things should be different. It doesn’t get stuck trying to reclaim control over something that was never fully ours to begin with. It just meets the moment as it actually is, and the more I sit with that, the more I realize how rarely we’re actually there.

"What is” arrives clean, but we don’t. We arrive carrying everything—our history, our patterns, our assumptions about what things mean—what I’ve framed before as our cultural tail.

So something happens, and before we’ve even really seen it, we’ve already started telling ourselves what it is.

Not seeing—naming. 

Not experiencing—interpreting.

And that interpretation feels immediate, natural, obvious even, but it isn’t neutral. It’s shaped by everything behind us. That’s the part I think gets misunderstood when we talk about will, free or not, because by the time we’re aware of a moment, a lot of it has already been decided—the reaction, the feeling, the first part of the story.

That’s not failure. That’s just momentum.

Here’s the part that matters, and I don’t think I said this clearly enough the last time I wrote about it:

Our story is already written—up to the point of “what is.”

Everything behind us… That’s the tail (tale).

But what comes next isn’t.

Here's where we get it wrong. We spend a lot of time wrestling with the past—trying to explain it, justify it, or wish it were different—as if that’s where our freedom lives.

It doesn’t.

The past has momentum, not possibility.

The future is the opposite.

It doesn’t come with a tail.

It doesn’t come with instructions.

It doesn’t even come with meaning yet.

There’s just space, and the only thing that fills that space is the way we stay with “what is” long enough to actually see it before we decide what it becomes.

That’s harder than it sounds. The pull to move quickly—to decide, to react, to close the loop—is strong. It feels efficient. It feels like clarity, but it’s usually just habit.

There’s a different way of being in a moment. Not passive, not detached, but present in a way that doesn’t rush to a conclusion. The kind of attention that notices the story forming without immediately believing it.

And this is the shift that matters:

If we don’t fully control what shows up, then fighting “what is” doesn’t give us freedom—it pulls us further away from the only place where anything can actually change.

Presence isn’t surrender. It’s the starting point of influence, because it’s only when we’re actually with reality—not arguing with it, not rewriting it in real time—that something new becomes possible.

That’s the space where a different story can begin, not because we’ve overridden everything behind us, but because we haven’t let it fully decide everything ahead of us.

This is where hope lives for me now—not in pretending things are different from what they are, and not in forcing a better outcome, but in staying with reality long enough that the future isn’t just a continuation of the past.

Because it doesn’t have to be. The story up to this point? That’s done. Written. Carried- but the part that hasn’t been written yet—that’s still open.

And it doesn’t get written by the tail.

It gets written by what we do, right here, in “what is.”