You have asked me twenty-one times in two days! I’m not going to be able to give you an answer.

It must be decided; it affects everything, touches everything.

It will never be decided, because it touches everything... it will just come to pass, and we will have to manage to live inside the results.

This is madness! There is no reason to wait any longer. We must act!

You feel that you must, and indeed, we must immerse ourselves in the problem; there we have no choice at all, but we cannot force our preferred goals on this universe. There is too much possibility of wounding innocent people.

No one else need become embroiled in this.

Agreed, but it will affect others (in fact, that's the point, isn't it?) —they might like to know.

No.

Is that a decision? Are you taking action? It’s precisely because you remained so long in shackles that we are now mired in these many precarious scenarios at once.

It wasn’t my responsibility.

A common complaint.

What could I have done? They were seizing peripheries, allowing no colonization of the unnecessary to occur. We were boxed in.

Maybe. But it’s the boxing one should object to, not the shape of the box.

That’s a meaningless thing to say. Are you saying I shouldn’t be concerned with appearances?

I’m saying that we sleep where we choose; there are always choices, and you have been refining the shape of this problem for a long time now... it just took a little calamity to realize the design.

© 2002 Joseph Robertson

 

A BRIEF INTRODUCTION TO THE PROBLEM
JOSEPH ROBERTSON

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