1/7 We spend a lot of time thinking about how we might salvage a concept of freewill, perhaps as an account of freewill as a limited agency operating within different kinds of determined systems, and the strategy here always seems the same:

2/7 Line up as many internal and external variables as we can and then somehow account for them in order to counteract them in the direction of greater control, or greater sovereignty, is the term I hear often. But what if we go the other way and re-think determinism itself.

3/7 I carry around with me concepts like grace and coincidence and flow that act to direct me in a way that doesn’t feel chosen or willed by me—the agency is coming from “outside”—and yet both the outcome, and the felt sense I have of being moved by them,

4/7 is not that I’m being closed in or cut off from action in a mechanically determined way, but that I am in fact being put to use by larger, older forces in a way that might be better at guiding action than the uses I put my limited individual self to in my acts of choosing.

5/7 There’s a kind of intuition or instinct acting here. My question is, then, How should we think about the role of, say, grace in questions about freewill and action? I’ve noted before that a lot of ascetic practice isn’t about building yourself up per se and is instead about,

6/7 to borrow a phrase from Martin Laird, “unselfing the self,” in other words, getting out of your own way, to the effect of reducing personal identity in the direction of greater possibility. I think this is the paradox of practice:

7/7 We initiate practice as a kind of renunciation that in turn transforms the personal will in the terms of a bigger pattern, not individual identity, and this paradox upends the emphasis on developing greater freewill through practice without ceding the ground to mechanism.