"Most Important"

This entry is a response to Lucas's entry titled "The Most Important Blog Post That You Will Ever Read."

In it, he states the following:

"At some point in your life, there will be a singular moment that will be the most important. This is an undeniable truth as long as you believe one thing, that thing being that moments have varying amounts of importance. Once that is accepted, it's very logical to reason that one moment in life will be at the top."

This is very logical. Very Western-philosophy, too. Quantification and ranking and order and logic. I started thinking about my life from this point of view. Which moment would be "most important?" Marrying? What about that first date with Sherry? Deciding to work at IBM and not some other place? Yet as important a those were, how different would life be without those moments? Quite astoundingly different, actually, but there might be another.

In a sense, the "most important" moment of my life was when my friends pulled me back onto the ice before I was washed away into the wintry Upper Iowa river, almost certainly to die. Because, if not for the outcome of that moment, I would have had no others.

There certainly have been some turning-points which I also judge to be highly important. I mentioned a few. I'd like to think they were the "most important." Those points were decisions I made, or actions I deliberately took. In the end, though, the "most" important action I took in my life so far might have been the careless, stupid one of stepping out on that thin ice, and the most important actions were taken by those friends. I probably owe my life to that moment. By extension, so does Lucas.

"You see there is only one constant. One universal. It is the only real truth. Causality. Action, reaction. Cause and effect."