It was almost ten o'clock in the evening. Kim, Olga (four years since the time when we hung out in Beijing), a friend of hers, and I were sitting on the terrasse of a cafe/bar located in the center of Athens. The magnificent Parthenon was somewhere within my sight, melancholically illuminant, as if the only constant in the entire world. The music was too loud for a pre-dinner drink. Kim and I had a sudden realization when we did the online check-in for our flight on the next day: it was supposed to depart at 7:20, but the boarding pass was for a different flight at 14:55. I was reasonably indignant because of the unforeseeable change of plan, and tried to call customer service and complained on Twitter and was prepared to go to great lengths to receive some fair settlement on the matter. But everyone else seemed not to be able to relate to my well-founded anger: aren't they doing you a gigantic favor by assigning you to a later flight? Maybe it's a sign that you shall stay in Greece forever?
Hence the next morning Kim and I had a little extra time to check out the Kerameikos Cemetery and the Ancient Agora. We walked in silence as the sun rose effortlessly to the clear sky and shone unreservedly on the rich land of inexhaustible history and widsom beneath our feet. I felt once again that I know too little. I felt that overarching helplessness in life of never being able to know more than too little, of never being able to be sure of how things are, how we are, and how it is all going to turn out, of always being stuck awkwardly between knowing and guessing. Yet it was okay. I guess one has to acknowledge one's limits before attempting the limitless. A woman carried a chair up the hill to sit at a corner of the Temple of Hephaestus, facing the Acropolis. That's probably one of the best views you could get anywhere. I seriously considered snatching that chair from her. I would sit where that woman was sitting forever. In the most literal sense. Kim and I had a discussion on a topic that I never get tired of discussing - is it fate, or is it chance? Are we what we're meant to be, or just the sum of a series of coincidences? Is one thing going to happen anyway, even if not in the particular moment when it happened, or would it never happen at a different point in time? Would we have ever met, if the mutual friend had not invited us for dinner on that day? Would we have ever come to Athens at all? Would our paths be completely different? Only one thing is for sure though: we would not be there in that moment discussing this. Every moment is transitory, yet it's all that matters in that moment. It's all that there is. It's all we have. We resolved on the theory that life is like this game (the name of which I forgot): there are a finite number of options at every decision-making crossroad, which may lead to a finite number of outcomes. A different choice at one point does not necessarily mean the same end cannot be achieved. But we never know. Maybe there is fate, but it entails a range instead of a point. You still have the flexibility within that range to make the most or least of life. Or when we again go back to what Maugham said - "when an action is performed it is clear that all the forces of the universe from all eternity conspired to cause it, and nothing I could do could have prevented it" - it's all but chance. You appear to have those options, but you would choose what you have chosen if you were put back into the circumstances. You choose the one that makes the most sense to you at the moment of deciding. If any factor changes, you decision might change accordingly. But in that moment in time, your choice is most likely a certainty. Unless you really just flipped a coin. Then we're back to square one. I got back to the post-winter chilliness in Vienna at five in the afternoon with the remaining resolution that I will make a fuss about the mysteriously changed flight. I never make a fuss about anything. I felt half-contented half-sorry after yelling at the poor guy from Austrian Airlines who received my call. Then I entered the Vietnamese restaurant. There is a "let it be" tea on the menu. "Maybe I should order that", I said. Except I didn't. I ordered a cold ginger lemonade, because the Pho had hot soup. See? Options are only there to give you the happy illusion that you have options.
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