I can’t remember what started it, but for the last couple of weeks I’ve been thinking a lot about the idea of destiny. Are we traveling through our lives like trains on a track, with a pre-set beginning and end point? When I think about destiny, I feel like I’m hurtling through time toward an end that’s already set, like a stationary point. And it’s hard to articulate why, but that scares the hell out of me – that it’s already out there waiting for me and there is no way, ever, for me to know what it is until I get there. I think there are a lot of people who feel the opposite – the idea of their lives being predetermined (by various Who’s or What’s) and that certain things are meant to happen is immensely comforting to them. You marry the person you marry because you two were meant to be. You were meant to do the job you do, have the friends you have, be the person you are. It’s a little easier to face disappointment, because you can sigh and say, “It just wasn’t meant to be.” I catch myself saying things like that all the time, even though I’m not sure I believe that anything is “meant” to be or not be. Can a person believe in things like that and also believe in a higher power? Do the two go hand in hand? It seems that way to me most of the time, but then sometimes it doesn’t. There have been moments in my life when I’ve felt like I was exactly where I was meant to be, at the moment I was meant to be there, with the person I was meant to be with. Sometimes everything lines up perfectly and it feels like that can’t possibly be a matter of chance. But if I’m brutally honest with myself, I have to admit that it probably is. When push comes to shove, I have a hard time believing anything is destined to be. The idea just doesn’t sit right with me. I think it’s more likely that our lives are a series of accidents, a mess of interconnecting paths that could just as easily have crossed in completely different ways than they do, or never crossed at all, if we made different choices. Maybe it doesn’t have the elegance of a laid-out map where we’re all following carefully planned-out, predestined paths…but I think it’s still beautiful. Just in a different way.
Here’s the thing, though: Even if nothing is meant to be, I think it’s a good policy to go through life looking for the people and things that feel like they are – people and things and moments that feel so right, they seem like they were meant for you…or you were meant for them. Even if there is no “predestined” path, those people and things and moments help us know when we’re on a good one.
