We Are Merely Tangents

When was the last time you made a plan and life gave you a completely different answer?

Life is a movement in which countless variables beyond our will are intertwined. The desires of other people, the flow of events, material conditions, physical laws, and temporal coincidences all move together. Life does not revolve around our individual will. You whisper a wish, but at the same moment, millions of other dreams, events, and possibilities continue to exist.

I encounter this truth every day while developing software. I write code with countless parameters and dependencies, but the moment the system begins to run, it builds a life of its own. Variables interact in ways I cannot always foresee, and a single parameter can trigger a chain reaction. Just as in life, my intention sometimes gets lost in the combination of all these factors, or it prepares a ground that will become a cause somewhere else.

Life grants no one special privileges. It simply flows as it is. From birth to death, we merely accompany this flow. Within this entire torrent, we are only tangents.

Both writing code and life itself have shown me that we cannot defeat complexity. We can only learn to walk with it. The burden or disappointment brought by existence can be lightened not through the effort to control, but by focusing only on the action itself. There is no guarantee of the outcome. The only thing that remains is the quality of our action in that moment, not as a spiritual goal, but because it is the only thing we can truly manage in an unpredictable system.