In my post titled, Where Were You When the Music Stopped? I drew an analogy between our collective behavior and attitude during this time of global pandemic and the game of musical chairs that most of us played as children. Out of that discussion there is one central question yet to be asked:
Whose hand was on the needle?
For you youngsters (haha… I said “youngsters”) who don’t know what that means, when I was a child, music was played by placing a needle on a vinyl record as a turntable spun the record around. In musical chairs, whoever was running the game would place the needle on the record to start the march. At some point, the person with their hand on the needle would lift it, thereby stopping the music and sending everyone scurrying for a chair.
Two truths immediately rise to the surface: Without the music, there can be no game, and the nature of the game is determined solely by the hand on the needle.
A force must exist that compels us, that drives us forward, that determines the outcomes of our actions. It could be one force, or it could be many, but there must be a unifying presence governing the game. Otherwise, either everything would be in perpetual chaos, or we wouldn’t be playing at all.
In musical chairs, the governing force was the music. The game could be skewed in a number of directions based on variables such as whether the hand on the needle was an adult, or another child, whether that person was randomly lifting the needle or if they were peeking. Perhaps most significantly, the outcome of the game was determined by whether the hand on the needle was invested. Did The Hand have a favorite? Did The Hand have a plan? Did The Hand care at all who won?
It’s a short hop, skip, and a jump to consider The Hand on the Needle in a cosmic sense.
We are all scurrying round and round, looking for our respective places in life, grabbing a chair when opportunity presents itself and doing what we must to retain our beloved position as the music starts and stops throughout our lives. But then who—or what—exactly, is The Hand on the Needle?
Is it God? I guess it would depend on your image of God, and whether you think s/he is getting some kind of sick pleasure out of the whole business of watching humans flail and struggle. But clearly a loving God wouldn’t place us into a situation where a certain number of us are doomed to fail. I like to think that if the God I believe in were conducting a game of musical chairs, he would have enough chairs for everyone, and would just raise the needle for the sheer joy of watching us playfully squeal and laugh with delight. No one left out; no one goes home feeling like a loser.
But you don’t need to consider this possibility for very long to recognize that the world does not happen that way, nor has life ever been like that. We have always marched with our fear and grappled with our inhibitions, insecurities, and inadequacies as we’ve scrambled to secure a spot for ourselves. Most of us are born and buried steeped in the struggle to meet our needs, to protect our agendas, to save ourselves.
In another version of God, he is a cheater, rigging the game so that some will win while others are meant to lose. We call this part of His Plan, and we say that while we can’t always understand it, the chair we get—or don’t get—is part of that plan. And even though we can’t see it, and even though it hurts (sometimes agonizingly so) it’s for our good. And while we shake our fists and cry out at the injustice of it all, we are no match for The Hand. The Hand has an agenda of its own, operates by a logic we can’t understand, and holds all power.
What a futile, fearsome, scourge human existence would be in such a cosmos. We are born with talents and desires, with aspirations and dreams, into a time and place over which we have had no say, and we are basically impotent to change any of it. We have logic and imagination and vision, but none of it does us any good unless it fits in with the plans of The Hand—a plan to which we can never be privy. It’s like asking us to choose the chair we will land in before the music even starts. It's a game we cannot win.
So what, then?
Some people would say it’s karma that controls the needle. They would postulate that the circumstance of our current life is the cumulative result of past decisions, choices, actions, thoughts—not only of this life but of other lives of which we have no recollection. We are playing a much longer game, one whose beginning we can’t see or remember, and whose end we will never realize with our present consciousness. Our job is not necessarily to win, to find a spot, but rather to accept and work with the conditions in which we find ourselves. We do this with the understanding that we created our own circumstance and the best way forward is to bear it with non-attachment and compassion, thereby easing our suffering in this life and increasing our chances of a better run next time around.
Sometimes that makes sense to me, but sometimes it just seems like a big fat rationalization for why we have no real power in life, packaged together with a series of mechanisms for coping with our impotence so that we don’t jump off the nearest bridge.
Perhaps there is no sense or order to the game at all. Is it all luck and fate? Life as a big crap shoot… one rises, one falls. One lives, one dies. One casts the net and gets a fish while the next one pulls an old rubber boot from the water. One guy throws the dice for the jackpot, and another one to lose all of his chips. One woman gets Prince Charming, the next one gets cancer. A baby is born to live and grow, a baby never takes a breath. All just random, without sense or purpose. Life. That’s life. Don’t take it personally.
But life is nothing if not personal.
When I was small, I believed that if I said my prayers and didn’t sin too much, I would earn God’s favor. He had a special plan for me and when I was done being groomed and when my lessons were complete, my chair would appear. A golden throne, gleaming in a shaft of sunlight. As I grew older and found myself still standing, still wrestling with purpose and meaning, I was informed that I never had to earn God’s favor, that I have always had it by nature of my existence; all I had to do was receive it.
Yet after decades of saying my prayers and not sinning too much and bearing excruciating lessons and holding my arms open in yearning receptivity, the reasons and the logic that held any of this together began to become unstitched. None of the explanations that were doled out to me had proven true. So I began to wonder. Could it be that all of these ideas were simply conjured up and served to people like me who longed to make sense of life? Were they all just different versions of the same fairy tale whispered in my ear so I wouldn’t spend my days in angst at the horror of being born with the drive to seek and attach meaning to existence in general, and the curiosity and diligence for finding the purpose of my particular life, only to discover that there are no definitive answers?
Blind faith would tell me that I don’t need to understand The Hand on the Needle. It would say, Stop torturing yourself with things you can’t fathom. Just know that one day, it will all make sense.
“When?” I ask.
After you die, it says.
Blind faith’s mission is to get me to stop asking the questions, to throw up my hands and relinquish the quest to find answers for my life.
“Why am I here? Am I called to fulfill a purpose? Will I know it when I see it? Did I miss it?”
Fuggedaboutit! It will all work out in the end, and it’s none of your business anyway.
Then why have the desire to seek? Why have the capacity to wonder? Can all of life’s questions be packaged into tidy systems of belief, tied up with colorful ribbons and shiny bows, reinforced by regularly associating with others who have chosen the same package, who agree to agree with me? Do I just need to select one, like a grab-bag gift, and then commit myself to it? Choose one, forsake all others. Damn the doubts.
At least it would be a relief from the constant contemplation, self-examination, and reflection, a break from scrutinizing my life and striving to discern the pattern in it, longing for a chair to sit in. I’ve always been (overly) analytical, but these days, there are fewer distractions, locked in and locked down with me, myself, and I. Everywhere I turn I find myself looking into a new mirror.
The pandemic has made philosophers of all those who are really paying attention. Whatever hand is on the needle now, we can’t know it or control it or befriend it or frighten it. It is bringing us face-to-face with what we believe, with what we fear, with what we’ve done with our lives, with the possibility that we may be next on the list.
We are at the mercy of a microbe; beholden to a thing and a force that we cannot see or know. As we always have been. Only now, we are aware of it. Now, we are experiencing our own powerlessness, our own insignificance in the grand scheme, even our own participation in the nightmares we entertain.
I still don’t have any answers. Living through this pandemic has only given me more questions. So much of what I have believed is coming under scrutiny and is being refined in the crucible.
But two things I now know: Life is a mess, and we are in it together. In your eyes I see a reflection of the fear I have come to know so well, and of the questions that rattle around in my head. In that reflection, my own humanity is validated because we share it, and fear loosens its grip on me. Just a bit. Enough to hang on for another day, and to keep asking the questions.
I also see my ability to feel joy in the photos you post of a sunset blazing orange and pink. I see my playfulness in your parodies about “Cuomosexuality,” your funny memes of the Queen, your recipe for Vienna sausage in a gelatin mold, your videos of baby goats in pajamas jumping on bales of hay. I see my silliness in your photos of your cat dressed up as a pirate, and the Broadway revues from your living room. I see my beauty in your virtual global orchestras and in your prayers for the suffering and grieving all around us.
Whatever Hand is on the Needle, it has given us to each other. We are not alone. It is your companionship, your energy, and your very presence that comforts me, heals me, cheers me, moves me.
And that gives me hope that The Hand on the Needle does have a plan, does care, and is moved by something like love.
🕊 & ❤️
Julie
Julie Scipioni is the co-author of the bestselling novel series for women, "Iris & Lily," and author of "Taking the Stairs: My Journal of Healing and Self-Discovery.” Julie’s debut solo novel, “downward facing dogs” is also now available on Amazon. For more information and to order, see Julie’s Amazon Author page.