Fate
“When it
comes to life, we spin our own yarn, and where we end up is really,
in fact, where we always intended to be.”
Julia
Glass (Three Junes)
Do you believe in fate? I
had a conversation with friends about this question last night. Does
fate play a role in determining the day-to-day events, and even the course of our lives? I
believe it does, but others said no, that we map our lives, or as
Julia Glass puts it, “we spin our own yarn.” I believe in fate
because there are so many unforeseen circumstances that happen that
no one could have predicted, which change the course of a life
forever—and not by choice. The person that springs to mind is a
young man I know who received a spinal cord injury a couple of years
ago. He certainly had mapped a course for his life, was engaged to be
married, had a thriving medical practice, and was going about the
business of living the good life. In no world did he expect to be paralyzed from
the waist down. Fate intervened.
There are good ways that
fate intervenes, too—we meet the love of our life in a parking lot,
or on the train, or in the supermarket. We run into an old friend who
offers us a job just when we were losing hope. Unplanned, unexpected,
and delightful. So, yes, I believe that fate plays a role in every
life. To be sure, there are opportunities along the way to make
choices—we can choose to walk right by that unexpected encounter,
or we can decide not to interact. Most of us can choose with whom we share our time and bed and money, and what we read, or eat. We have options
about how we respond to our fate, how we choose to speak to and about
others, how we modulate our words and tone of voice.
Most of all, we choose
how we think—how we think about our fate, our life, our friends and
family and the world as a whole. We can take ourselves straight down
a rat-hole or to the mountain top with our thoughts. Fate deals the
cards, but we play the hand. It's easier to do that when we have help and
support and solid ground beneath our feet. It's harder when we don't
have those benevolent gifts. When we encounter another person whose
fate has served up a truly bad hand—no trump cards, no aces—the very
least we can do is realize “there but for the grace of God, go I,”
and treat them with the respect and compassion we would want for
ourselves. Only grace stands between us—only grace and fate.
In the Spirit,
Jane
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