Arrival

Knowing the cost, and choosing anyway

Most of us don’t think of ourselves as people who avoid our lives. We think we’re being reasonable. Careful. Waiting for the right time.

But if you look closely, there are small, almost invisible moments, where something in front of you could be stepped into, but isn’t.

That’s a pattern I keep noticing in my own writing, though I don’t always name it directly. It shows up under different forms. Sometimes it looks like something about physical effort in sports. Other times it reads more like a reflection on aging, or identity, or the quiet shifts that happen over time. But underneath, it’s often the same set of ideas, circling each other from different angles.

Agency.
Identity.
Fear.

I fully realize that these three words sound abstract when you line them up like that. But I don’t mean them to be. Because in practice, they collapse into something much simpler, though albeit much harder to sit with.

The effort required to choose.

By this I don’t mean in the obvious sense. Not choosing between two visible options. But something more subtle. The moments when another way of seeing things briefly becomes available. The moments where a life could open slightly in one direction or another. And in those moments, something in you either moves… or doesn’t.

We tend to believe we choose clearly. That we see what’s in front of us and act accordingly. But more often than we admit, what looks like “not choosing” is a choice shaped by something we don’t even recognize as fear.

Because fear rarely shows up as fear.

It shows up as delay. As rationalization. As “not now.” As a quiet reshaping of the past into something that justifies staying where we are. Stories we tell ourselves about who we are, what we’re capable of, what has or hasn’t worked before.

Over time, those stories harden. They stop feeling like interpretations and start feeling like facts. And from there, the range of what we actually choose begins to narrow.

Last night I watched the movie Arrival, from Denis Villeneuve.

It would be easy to walk away from it thinking it’s a film about aliens arriving on Earth, teaching us something, and leaving. It’s not that that reading is incorrect. It’s just not the point. The aliens are almost a device. Necessary, given the format the movie maker chose, but not remotely the point.

What’s interesting is that the film never announces the shift it’s making. It doesn’t reward surface-level watching with a big explanatory speech. There’s no actual Aha! moment, save perhaps at the end, when past, future and present collapse. So depending on how someone engages with it, they can walk away with completely different films in their head.

What the film is actually doing is much more destabilizing. It takes something we experience as fixed — time — and quietly removes the assumption that it must unfold in a straight line, through the use of circles. We experience it as linear, of course, because that’s how our cognition organizes memory and anticipation. Past, present, future. In sequence. Cause, then effect.

But the film suggests that may not be a property of the universe so much as a habit of mind. Change that, and the world doesn’t so much change — your access to it does.

If fear sits anywhere, it sure sits there.

In the meaning we assign to what has already happened. In the conclusions we draw from it. In the discomfort we carry in the present. And in the fear of change or of the unknown future. In the quiet agreements we make with ourselves about what is possible, and what isn’t.

The scenes in the movie that look like memories reveal themselves to be something else entirely. Not at all the past, but the future, present in a different way.
Coexisting rather than following.

And the film refuses the lazy version of that idea. It doesn’t turn that awareness into power. And it doesn’t use it to avoid loss, or rewrite outcomes in typical Hollywood melodramatic or superhero multiverse fashion.

In the film, the woman played by the actor Amy Adams comes to understand that if she chooses to have her child, she will also live through losing her. That outcome is not uncertain. It’s known.

And that’s precisely what changes the weight of the choice.

It leaves you with a choice that is no longer shielded by uncertainty. You know what will happen. You know what it will cost. And you choose it anyway.

Or don’t.

That really stayed with me a long time. Not because we experience time that way — we don’t. But because of how close that premise sits to something we already live with.

And that’s where the film stops being about time, or universal language, or even science fiction.

We can’t “see” the future like the character in the movie. But we’re not as blind as we sometimes pretend to be. We recognize patterns. We anticipate outcomes. We’ve lived through enough to have a sense of what certain decisions tend to lead to.

We know, often more than we admit. How a relationship might unfold. What a decision is likely to cost. Where a path tends to lead. Not always with certainty, but with enough clarity that it’s no longer innocence.

And still, we choose.

Or don’t.

That tension — between seeing what’s possible and watching how often it goes unused — is, more and more, what I find myself writing about. When you age, the sense of urgency kicks in too.

I am trying to live a life I do not need to protect myself from.

Not because it will be easy. It won’t. Not because I won’t continue to make mistakes. I will. Not because it will spare me loss. It can’t.

But because organizing a life around protection has a cost. It’s understandable. We all do it in different ways. But over time, it narrows what we are willing to step into, often without us even noticing.

What this points toward is something else entirely. Not the absence of risk. Not indifference to pain. But a life where you don’t organize yourself around avoidance.

That’s different.

As I’ve written in past articles, it doesn’t mean you won’t feel fear. It just means fear doesn’t get to run the show or decide the boundary of your life. In the movie, the woman chose, knowing pain would come. But she accepted that.

And that’s the trade.

You feel more, not less. You’re more exposed—to disappointment, to endings, to change. To being misunderstood and at times even judged. You don’t get to hide behind “maybe later.”

But in return, you get more contact with the world. More texture in experience. More moments that are actually lived, not deferred.

Because if you feel—even vaguely—that time is not infinite, and that certain experiences depend on how you live now, then agency stops being abstract.

It becomes something direct.

How much of what is available to me am I willing to step into, knowing it will cost something? Effort. Discomfort. Uncertainty. Vulnerability.

Some people avoid the cost and lose the experience. Others accept the cost and expand what their life can hold. Neither path is easy.

Those paths continue to diverge almost imperceptibly, but steadily, over time.

Given what you already sense about your life, which are you actually choosing?

Because arrival isn’t something you wait for.
It’s something you step into, even knowing the cost.