Decades ago, I had a neighbor with an RV - a big one. He would park it in a narrow corner of his back yard. It looked like an impossibly tight squeeze, and it very nearly was. I would watch him parking from my kitchen window, and learned his secret, a very simple one - patience. He could spend an hour inching back and forth, altering the angle of that behemoth a degree or two on each iteration, until finally the RV was snugly installed in its parking place.

I remembered that neighbor a few years ago, when the only space available for our minivan in the parking garage of a downtown Ottawa hotel was a tiny spot in an equally tight corner. "We can do this," I told the child I was travelling with. It took several minutes of careful back-and-forths, but I knew all along that we would succeed, because each time we changed direction, the angle got a little bit closer to what we needed it to be. Better yet, the same strategy got us out of that space the next morning.

When it comes to the debate between determinism and free will, I was once wholly on the side of free will. (Determinism, according to Wikipedia, “is a philosophical view where all events are determined completely by previously existing events.” Free will is “the capacity or ability to choose between different courses of action unimpeded.”) I used to believe that I could do whatever I made my mind up to do - a belief that brought with it an exhilarating sense of power, but also a heavy weight of self-condemnation when I didn’t live up to my high ideals. 

Experience has tempered that view. First there are the multitude of factors that are completely out of my control, from the weather to every other blooming person on this planet. I like this version of the serenity prayer: “God grant me serenity to accept the people I cannot change, courage to change the one that I can, and wisdom to know that it’s me.”

But do I have the power to change myself? For one thing, habits are obstinate things. And then, increasingly as I age the limits of my physical stamina loom up and smack me in the face like a brick wall. Many days in every month, I find myself hobbled by depression or anxiety. More often than not, it’s impossible to discern between the physical limitations and the emotional ones. At what point does fatigue become depression, or anxiety wear down into fatigue? I can’t tell you. All I know for sure is that there are hours, and sometimes days, when all the free will I can muster isn’t enough to get me off the couch. 

It has come to the point where there are so many factors limiting my free will that I feel as constrained as I was in that minivan in the little parking garage. But not completely bound. There is always some room to maneuver. If a loved one is making choices I don’t like, I can still reach out to them with love. If they make even that impossible, I can pray for them. If I can’t stop myself from scrolling on my phone when I should be sleeping, I can leave the phone out of reach. If I can’t get off the couch to sit at the computer, I can write on my phone. That is how this post came to be!  (By the way, I find that prayer really helps me identify where my free will is still in play.)

The beautiful thing is that all those little maneuvers add up to big changes in position. Prayer and kind actions, over time, perfect the feelings I have for someone hard to love. A good night’s sleep leads to a better day tomorrow. A few paragraphs scrawled on my phone grow into a blog, and better yet, a sense of satisfaction that lifts my mood and energy.

So I’m still on the side of free will, not determinism. In spite of all the factors that constrain me, I do have the power to change my life - one tiny maneuver at a time.