While sitting on a couch I hadn’t sat in before, a monologue on a TV show that I don’t normally watch, quoting a line from literature that I’d never read, told me: we are a single life weaving together with all others, a tapestry.
Do you believe in destiny?
I don’t believe that the keys to our existence are found in the scientific belief of inevitable cause and effect. I also don’t think that there is an eternal, all powerful being that is externally guiding us through hula-hoops of purpose. Both of these explain – and explain wonderfully – our existence. But neither endows me with the sense of trust that the word “destiny” ought to.
This sense of trust that I do, in fact, have.
In a book I did read the protagonist had a choice. Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, so to speak. And the traveller, on about page 56, he made a decision. That decision led to his meeting someone, which led to another decision, which led to the end of the book. When I closed the book, and put it on the shelf, the protagonist had finished his life. As far as I knew, he had lived, and he had made choices, and then he had died. It was beautiful.
It is true that he lived, purely because the author had created him. If there had never been an all powerful being externally guiding him through the hula-hoops of chapter headings, he would have never had the opportunity to make a decision. Prior to the work of this diligent creator, he existed only as a dream.
It is true that had I never finished the book, he would never have died. As the reader, I witnessed the inevitable cause and effect that his life had been victim to. As I turned every page, I saw that his life was written in stone, and could not have been any other way. For truly, when have you ever known a book to change its words?
But why did my young traveller, on about page 56, take the road less travelled? Was his choice free? Did he really make it? Was it ultimately meaningful? If no one ever read the book, would it have happened? Did it really happen at all, since I found the account in the Fiction section of the bookstore?
I don’t know. And though I want to get into all of my answers for the subsequent questions (yes, yes, yes, yes, and yes), none of them really matter. No answer, no matter how profound, pinpoints exactly why I enjoy an idea of destiny. It’s not about being trapped against my will, or glorifying my will. It’s about recognizing that I am a player in a story.
Maybe no one will read it. Maybe no one’s really writing it. Maybe I have a choice, or maybe I just think I do. Maybe I take the road less traveled, or maybe I take the road that everyone else took. But I am in a book. Its chapters are years long, and it has numerous plots and sub-plots. Sometimes I’m a main character, sometimes I’m that quirky guy on the side, and sometimes my role is barely noticed at all.
It’s the biggest book that there ever was, and we’re in it. That’s destiny.
- Z
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