It’s mid-afternoon on a sultry and glistening mid-summer Saturday in the country. Having just completed a constitutional navigation up and down the Ottawa Valley preceded naturally by a car wash – and (just for the record and my undying deliverance) having previously cycled about the neighbourhood with my partner – I’m now smugly stationed at Equator Café judiciously sipping a quad espresso. I have perched upon a relaxed lounge chair facing the 12-foot windows, fully content to watch the equating world go by. Seated at table behind me is a young impressionable couple and their infant child. The child has succeeded to reach astonishingly high decibels of soprano screams as he rhythmically bangs a spoon.

The tranquility of the day (everybody seems to have vacated both urban and suburban environments for what I guess are more endearing summer surroundings) is disrupted not only by the unwitting pathetic fallacy of a child’s innocence but also by a less obtuse and simmering friction. Upon awakening this morning I suffered entanglement in throttled exuberance (perhaps an extension of overnight meditations, those incomprehensible and mercurial emissions of ludicrous midnight reflections). After the restorative effect of intentionally applied cold water (the indisputable virtue of which I am routinely reminded by my erstwhile physician) it required only elemental application of logic to surmount the emotional reveries. Intuition, albeit effervescent, is not an unqualified purity. I shall forever remain an irreligious Stoic!

Through the manufacture of a summary characterization of a lifetime – a hurried congestion though dutiful admission of both chance and fortune (if indeed there is a disjunction) – I have concluded that no matter what the capital or whence it is withdrawn, the only rationally consistent and emerging ingredient of any biographical narrative is the unique mystique abbreviated within oneself. A reflection of past images of unpredictable excursions has invigorated the seminal chaos of life.

The conclusion I have drawn from these incorruptible premises critically approaches axiomatic. Even if it were merely pragmatic accommodation, it nonetheless reflects life’s grandeur. For example, given the identical credentials – howsoever metaphoric – the sole inheritance is from within. I choose to sidestep the philosophic theoretical scrutiny of the source of knowledge, preferring instead to embrace the demonstrable variation and source of empirical activity.

There is too an important connection between relevance and description. In short, the horizon – no matter how magnificently portrayed within one’s mind or the more compelling tableaux of commercial travel – is affected by the identical limitations and nature of the candidate. There remains immense capacity for whimsical determination (we submit to prospect and possibility more often than acknowledged). Yet it requires only an invitation to subscribe to the future, quickly to diminish the breadth of potential to what is at hand.

Accordingly I am bound to convey my heartfelt conviction that, as I believe Voltaire so accurately observed, “This is the best of all possible worlds!”

The phrase “the best of all possible worlds” (French: Le meilleur des mondes possibles; German: Die beste aller möglichen Welten) was coined by the German polymath and Enlightenment philosopher Gottfried Leibniz in his 1710 work Essais de Théodicée sur la bonté de Dieu, la liberté de l’homme et l’origine du mal (Essays of Theodicy on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil), more commonly known simply as the Theodicy. The claim that the actual world is the best of all possible worlds is the central argument in Leibniz’s theodicy, or his attempt to solve the problem of evil.

53. Now as there are an infinity of possible universes in the ideas of God, and but one of them can exist, there must be a sufficient reason for the choice of God which determines him to select one rather than another.

54. And this reason is to be found only in the fitness or in the degree of perfection which these worlds possess, each possible thing having the right to claim existence in proportion to the perfection which it involves.

55. This is the cause for the existence of the greatest good; namely, that the wisdom of God permits him to know it, his goodness causes him to choose it, and his power enables him to produce it.