The Gospel According to St. Kit

Tonight marks a first with KEYNOTES. We have a guest blogger: God. Well, actually God as channeled by His or Her disciple Kit Winter. The blog comes in the form of an epistle. And no, before you even assume what I know you probably will– Kit Winter is an actual man and not one of my alter-egos. Besides all that, he is a good friend to boot and has been for quite some time. When I opened my email this morning, I was happy to see an email from my friend Kit but upon opening I found out, as you will presently will, it was actually a message from The Almighty via Kit’s email box.

Before I hand the mic over to Kit (and God), I’d like to take this opportunity to officially change my policy on the blog. You are all now welcome to comment on or write to me about the blog. In the beginning of this process, I was simply too raw to accept a lot of unsolicited feedback. Sorry for being so nasty to those who decided to give it anyway. You may now send your traffic at will, I’ll just do my best to ignore the ones that annoy me. Just realize too that there will be no way I can respond to everyone’s sally.

Take it away Kit—

Dear Jeff Key:  

 

This is God here, writing from Kit Winter’s email account.  I am also working through Kit Winter’s fingers, because I don’t exist in any physical form, not in the way that shoes and lizards and Best Western motels exist.  So I can’t type.  But I’m here all the same.  When I say “here,” I really mean “everywhere,” because a being without a physical presence in your dimension cannot actually be anywhere in particular, in terms of geographic coordinates.  Since I can’t be anywhere, and yet I am here, I must be everywhere.   The whole thing is really kind of hard to explain, and it’s not worth trying to figure out anyway – you either roll with the mystery, or you don’t, and beyond that you’ll just make yourself crazy.  There’s no mileage in analyzing me, I’m ambiguity made manifest. 

 

Anyway, the reason I’m writing is because I read your blog post today, and I had to say, you are one brilliant motherfucker, although frankly a bit more of the “tortured soul” variety than I had really intended.  Since I am God, you would think that I know everything (and I do) – but I’m not human, and I’m certainly not you, so my knowledge is biased toward the factual (where things are) and the procedural (how things happen) rather than toward the kind of individual episodic knowledge that you have.  I see the big picture.  I can see the small picture too, if I want to, but in order to do that I have to stop looking at the big picture. Since I tend to feel like it’s my job to keep an eye on the big picture, I get anxious if I take too much time looking at the details. Which is to say, I don’t read your blog every day.  Sorry.

 

When I say I didn’t intend for you to be a tortured soul, what I meant was that I put all this shit in motion, but a lot of it just moves in ways that I don’t foresee.  I never expected that people would put themselves through such misery trying to figure things out all the time.  I personally never devote any time to figuring things out, so it caught me off guard.  There’s usually nothing I can do to help, but I came across Kit sitting in front of his computer with a mind completely devoid of any thought, and it was pretty easy to jump in here and try to give some advice. 

 

So here it is.  You’ve heard of the multiverse theory, right?  That every decision everyone makes spins off a completely new universe, such that all possible decisions are made in some universe?  It’s bullshit. That doesn’t happen.  I mean, think about it – that morning you decided to wear your shorts instead of your blue jeans, you think there’s an entire universe out there in which every single detail is the same for the past 13 billion years, except that you are wearing blue jeans instead of shorts?  There’s no need for that.  When you picked the shorts, the possibility of a universe in which you picked the blue jeans vanished forever.  

 

To me this seemed pretty obvious, which is probably why I didn’t foresee the whole “tortured soul” problem.  I thought I was giving you guys a gift:  YOU CAN NEVER MAKE THE WRONG DECISION.  I really thought you’d be happy and grateful about that. Not my best work, I guess, it’s a constant source of unnecessary human suffering.    And even when I say it, no one believes me.  But I can prove it.

 

Let’s take as an example you marrying Adam.  That didn’t turn out well, so I figure you may feel that marrying him was the wrong decision.  But in order to know whether or not it was a bad decision, you would need to be able to compare it to a life in which you didn’t marry him.    That world doesn’t exist, and has never existed – and if it did exist, then the world in which you DID marry him wouldn’t exist.    This is all just stories in your head.  I can tell you a different story – one in which you didn’t marry Adam, correctly pegging him for a liar and a user – but you regretted it for years, feeling like you’d passed up your one chance at love and happiness.  One night you convinced yourself that you would have been able to change Adam, make it work, and instead you dumped him.  The pain of your loneliness that night led you to blow your brains out, and that was the end of the story in which you didn’t marry Adam.

 

You get that I made that up, right?  It’s fiction, completely fabricated, never happened.    What would have actually happened if you hadn’t married Adam?  You would be financially secure right now, and a famous playwright, with lovely homes on both coasts!  

 

But no.  I just made that up too.  I know everything, but I don’t know what would have happened if you hadn’t married Adam, that universe never ever existed.   We could make up a million stories about how it would have been, but they’re nothing but fantasies, projections of our current dissatisfaction into an alternate world of our imagination.  

 

This is always true, of every decision you make.  When you decide to go the Dairy Queen instead of the gym, the universe in which you go to the gym instead of the Dairy Queen never exists.  If an asteroid kills everyone at the gym, you might say to yourself, “aren’t I lucky, I almost went to the gym instead of the Dairy Queen!”  You find yourself shaken because of the close call.

 

But there’s no close call.  You weren’t at the gym when the asteroid hit.  The world in which you see yourself going to the gym and dying along with everyone there is a habitual “what if” brain process that is nothing but your imagination.

 

When you make a choice, you can never know what the world would have looked like if you had made a different choice.  “I would have been happier if I had gone to Harvard instead of Yale”: NO.  There is no way to know.  A trillion variables would have been different and the universe would have unfolded in ways that you could not begin to foresee.  “I should have bought a Prius instead of this Ford 150”: NO.  You could be dead, or miserable, or any number of things, but from where you stand you cannot see them, because they don’t exist, and never existed, because you bought the Prius.

 

I can’t emphasize enough how much I wish people would stop doing this.   I mean, think about it:  here is a person, alive, with a life full of choices and opportunities.  Sometimes bad things happen.  What does the person do?  They imagine a fantasy world in which the bad thing didn’t happen, and no other bad thing happened either, and then they berate themselves for not existing in a world that corresponds to the non-existent world they fabricated.  It’s maddening.  You are simply not permitted to know what it would have been like if you had chosen differently, because that world never existed.  Hard stop. Every single thing you believe about what life would be like “if only I had done X instead of Y” is a complete lie.

 

I may be harping on this point too much, but I want you to really get it.  The past is gone.  The future is a dream.  The only thing that exists is the present, THIS present, not any other one in which things happened differently.   

 

When the Third Step says “turn your will and your life over to the care of  God as you understand Him,” all it means is “walk the (branching) path that unfolds in front of you without fear that you will make the wrong decision” (because, as I hope I have sufficiently proven, there are no wrong decisions).  Release yourself from the burden of making the right choice.  There is no right choice. The most you can ever do is make the best choice you can given the information and resources available to you at the time.  That is the right choice and it doesn’t require tormented second-guessing to accomplish.  Tormented second-guessing gets you nothing.  

 

It does NOT mean I’m going to step in and make decisions for you.  That’s ridiculous.  I couldn’t possibly do that.  If I had to I would just flip a coin.  You might complain, but you’ll never prove I should have done something else.   

 

I need to go now, because Kit’s eye is twitching and I think he may be coming to.   I’m very proud of your existence, Jeff – the flowering of beauty from pain and rage and chaos never fails to knock my socks off.  You’re doing great.  But please, stop trying to fix yourself, you’re not broken. Stop trying to figure out how to get rich, it’s beyond your ability to accomplish through brainpower.  Have faith that everything will work out and jump into life and DO things and great things will happen.  

 

Love, 

 

God

 

Thanks Kit… and God.

See y’all tomorrow