"The essence of horror lies in the fact
that ancient ideas survive in modern minds."
-unknown
As someone who doesn't believe in the supernatural, the idea of destiny is quite fantastical to me. I find no good evidence for divine creators, extraterrestrial manipulators, or reality simulation programmers. Sure, at some level the Universe obeys natural laws making for a decent amount of predictability. Planetary orbits, engine cycles, physical health and more all have some time tested science behind them. But destiny feels to me like wishful thinking at best or a dead end reason to do nothing and let life take whatever path it will. I do believe our lives unfold, at least in part, from desire and derring-do (more on these in future articles).
Destiny notwithstanding, I do believe there is a major element of luck in the world. Luck is at work tirelessly affecting our pursuits and pretty much all the things that happen around us. At any given place and time the events for billions of years on end have come together to create the current situation, an entirety of situation no one can understand fully.
(This isn't to say ANYTHING can happen in reality; whether we like it or not the laws of nature have their limits. The human mind, on the other hand, has the ability to imagine extreme fantasies and horrors, paradises and apocalypses, daydreams and nightmares, all too often ignoring the questionable evidence and wishful thinking we permit ourselves.)
Now true luck isn't the passive, magical ability to conjure up a future scenario that someone wants for themselves. Instead real luck represents the myriad of elements in play at any given time and place. Generally these are things we have no control over. No matter how much research we do before taking an action or how intensely we feel the moment is right, we cannot entirely predict how other people will react, what random events in the moment might affect their thoughts and emotions, or even how we ourselves will react when things turn out differently from the way we wanted.
So destiny feels to me like a fever dream. No matter how hard we try, the outcome can be different than we expect. And we shouldn't be so hard on ourselves or others when our expectations aren't met. Instead, we should find the best aspects we can in the moment while allowing any disappointment and sadness to dissipate over time. Living in the imperfect moment has its hidden joys if we stay present. With patience we can be ready to seize the next lucky moment and expand on it when it arrives.
In the end, though, it still can be very hard. Acceptance that our expectations won't ever be completely filled can be centering. Destiny aside, maybe the white lie "it wasn't meant to be" can be helpful to the human mind in coping with reality. The idea that outcomes aren't entirely under our control can help our human minds offload the blame from ourselves by recognizing luck, timing and circumstance are in play.
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