How and why did our lives take the directions they took and find the destinations they reached?
Why did we choose one job or career over another, one place to live rather than another, one marriage partner rather than another? And so on.
As I look back over the seven-decade arc of my life, I find myself thinking more deeply about such questions from the perspective that only time can provide.
Some believe the course of our lives is written in the stars, that it is predestined or God’s will.
Others believe that our fate is determined by chance, by random occurrences that individually or collectively alter and magnify the direction of our lives.
The first time I recall thinking seriously about this subject was when I saw the 1998 movie “Sliding Doors,” which Perplexity, an AI application, explains this way:
“The movie depicts two parallel storylines of a woman named Helen’s life based on whether she catches or misses a train.
“In one timeline, Helen gets fired from her PR job and catches the train home, where she discovers her boyfriend is cheating on her. She then meets a charming stranger named James on the train and eventually starts her own business.
“In the other timeline, Helen misses the train and remains blissfully unaware of her boyfriend’s infidelity for a time. She continues dating him and ends up working as a sandwich maker to support his writing….”
“The movie explores how a single chance event can drastically alter the course of someone’s life.”
Whichever view you take, predestined or random, our “fate” is determined, or at least significantly shaped, by powerful forces largely beyond our control that can have a large effect on our lives and through us the lives of others.
All of this brings us to “amor fati,” a phrase I recently encountered that loosely translates to love or embrace what life has given us, even if it is not what we wanted or less than others appear to have.
We are sometimes admonished to accept our fate because it is God’s will, or in secular terms, our destiny. Or we are told to resist that fate because we alone determine our futures, as in this line from “Invictus”: “I am the master of my fate; I am the captain of my soul.”
So, whichever view of fate you hold, Amor Fati reminds us that there is a benefit at some point in embracing rather than resisting that fate. (I discussed in this essay the challenge of deciding what to accept and what to resist.)
It is easier, of course, to hold that view when you don’t live in a war zone, are not fleeing the violence and poverty that surrounds you in many countries, or have not lost a loved one to gun violence, among many other ways in which fate can be cruel.
What do you think: Are our lives randomly determined or predestined, and is it asking too much to embrace what life has given us, no matter how difficult or unfair?