Email
PrintFate and destiny
Maybe you think that life is a series of random events coming at you 24/7 with no predictability. In this view, you’re just a pawn in the game with no chance of success if you happen to be born poor, or draw a bad card or get hit with a twist of fate. In this view, life is the byproduct of a chaotic cosmic soup of interstellar gases that collided and interacted with quarks and atoms billions of years ago, eventually producing your DNA. Or something like that.
I won’t quarrel with the Big Bang. But this random universe trope, the seed behind the current cult of atheism as depicted by Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris, is disturbing. It argues that there is no higher purpose, no soul, no spirit, no transcendence. Chance defines everything. And in this accidental universe you could be made to do and think anything. After all, you’re just an accident.
A lot of people are feeding at this trough, so it’s hard to know where to start. If you talk about imagination, a lot of naysayers claim it’s just a bunch of chemicals. If you talk about love, the same claim is put forth. So how do I lay out a truth that is far more complex and subtle without getting religious? To do that, I consult the Greeks. The Greeks nailed philosophy, tragedy, mythology and poetics more than two millennia ago. (Turns out that fate comes from fatum, Latin for “that which has been spoken.” So there’s a certain inevitability inherent in fate.) They said we all have fate and we all have destiny. Fate is woven through all of life. And destiny is a seed within fate, there to be plucked by those with imagination. How do we know this?
We all live it. All of us. Every day.
We are fated to be successful, but twists—unrepeatable snags in our storyline—sometimes take us down dark detours. We’re meant to succeed. But success comes at a cost, as the Greeks remind us in their tragedies. And who hasn’t known some personal tragedy? No one avoids getting wounded. Yet America doesn’t deal well with tragedy, though it dishes it out regularly to other countries.
Which brings me to a boating trip I took in California one summer with my family. Foolishly, I allowed myself to be convinced that I could pilot an old outboard motor boat on the vast waters of Big Bear Lake. My first choice of boat, a kayak, which I knew how to steer, was rented, and so in a terrible lapse of judgment, groggy from a house party that kept me up the night before, I assented and watched my family don life jackets. I was given a one-minute tutorial on the old boat and then pulled the throttle. The boat took off like a rocket and headed straight for the pylons 50 yards to the right, where we would certainly crash and perhaps some of us, my 3-year-old daughter for sure, might drown.
A moment of panic seized me. I tried to stop the boat, but nothing happened when I pulled back on the throttle. It seemed to be jammed. The man who rented us the boat was running like crazy, gesticulating wildly. We were 20 feet from crashing. But then something mysterious, something unexplainable happened. The boat did an almost 180 degree arc and ended up at the pier, the exact spot it started, the engine idling. I had done nothing. I had not even touched the rudder. But something was clear. Forces had interceded. The hand of fate had intervened. In fact, in a dream I had a few days later, Pegasus, the winged horse of Greek mythology and a symbol of imagination, appeared to me.
Some rationalist may think this a quirky coincidence; the boat was blown off course. It was all random chance etc. But they miss the profound lesson. Risk puts us in specific contexts where fate plays out. I saw my family’s mortality clearly that day. I would never again trifle with boats I can’t operate.
“Whenever we brush against the limits of our fate,” says mythologist Michael Meade, “we also stand near the doors of our destiny. When we face our fate in life we begin to move it, and when fate moves destiny moves closer. Only from the ground of destiny does an individual life make sense. Taken together fate and destiny are purpose seen from the other end of life.”
It’s just getting to that other end of life that’s the bitch.
