Fate?
Destiny?
I really don’t have the faintest idea what I am talking about. But maybe I am thinking that had I taken that job or the one in Kansas that was offered me at one time, I wouldn’t be the intensely miserable person I am today, eaten alive daily by anxiety and wiped out by depression. If good things happen to a person, doesn’t a person feel good? Not that bad things have happened to me, but not good enough to make me go around feeling good or happy or light hearted. I don’t feel good, I am not happy, and boy I am not light hearted.
So the idea of fate is just a way to reconcile yourself with wherever you are with the desperate idea that wherever you went or whatever you did you would be stuck with yourself and given that the self you are stuck with, in my case, is a miserable self I would have been miserable pretty much anywhere. Maybe this is a stoic sort of rationalization for my current state of being. But honestly I don’t think it is.
Had I become a Professor of Literature—who knows—I might have been happier getting to tell students great stories and emote about them and had I been able to do this in a small private school where I got to know the students and they got to know me I might have been much beloved as they say and when I died, lots of people attended my funeral and said all sorts of nice things about me.
And even with all that—who knows—I probably still would have been miserable eaten alive every day with anxiety and flattened out with depression. Some people say people don’t have selves anymore. We are like onions; keep peeling away the levels and finally you hit zero. I don’t buy it. We do have selves. It’s there wherever you go, and is buried way down there in the unconscious mind and is the foundation of who you are at the present moment. It’s the thing you are given to build upon or live with or not.
I don’t hear people talking about this stuff on TV. Maybe I should write a book or something.
People should talk about this stuff. It’s important.
What are we here for? To be like the lilies of the field and neither reap or sew. Or are we to be industrious and work for our fellow persons? Is the goal to achieve happiness and to maximize that happiness for others too? Or is happiness the goal of weak kneed. Perhaps the goal of life is suffering and to suffer. At one time, life was called the veil of soul making because—contrary to the idea of natural rights—one is not born with a soul. One has to work for it.
Certainly my goal is not to buy a Lexus.
