Exhalation: Stories

Based on our experience with human minds, it takes at least twenty years of steady effort to produce a useful person

we as humans are capable of creating meaning for our own lives.

We like the idea that there’s always someone responsible for any given event, because that helps us make sense of the world.

had never happened

The immediate problem is that Predictors demonstrate that there’s no such thing as free will

Though I am long dead as you read this, explorer, I offer to you a valediction. Contemplate the marvel that is existence, and rejoice that you are able to do so. I feel I have the right to tell you this because, as I am inscribing these words, I am doing the same.

the future, if Your Majesty sees fit to ask, but for myself, the most precious knowledge I possess is this:
Nothing erases the past. There is repentance, there is atonement, and there is forgiveness. That is all, but that is enough

All the while I thought on the truth of Bashaarat’s words: past and future are the same, and we cannot change either, only know them more fully. My journey to the past had changed nothing, but what I had learned had changed everything, and I understood that it could not have been otherwise. If our lives are tales that Allah tells, then we are the audience as well as the players, and it is by living these tales that we receive their lessons.

Bashaarat smiled. “Coincidence and intention are two sides of a tapestry, my lord. You may find one more agreeable to look at, but you cannot say one is true and the other is false.”

Nothing erases the past. There is repentance, there is atonement, and there is forgiveness. That is all, but that is enough.