Fate...

"I need to see this day changed...I need to see that it can be done." - Stuart Turton, The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle

You make plans. You plot, you plod, you arrange.  But somewhere in your gut, you can feel the fates smirk and scheme. A spinner, an alloter, a cutter, each crack their knuckles in turn, nod to one another, and set to work. Fibers twisted into filaments, made into a mother thread. Your life. Your days. Measured and given length. Tailored and trimmed. Unalterable. Inflexible. Bespoke. And, there’s nothing you can do. No other way for things to be. All of your best intentions turn to vanity, to naivety, a grasping at the wind.

A daisy chain of numbered boxes marked off in neat, successive rows. The unavailing hope that today will be different. And yet, none of your actions hold sway. Each step a practiced choreography. Something coded in your genes. Orchestrated mechanics keeping time. An Unconscious turning. As if a clockmaker made a watch and walked away. A world indifferent to everything you were, everything you are, everything you thought you’d be.

There is a thin line between persistence and delusion, between consistency and insanity, and you can't ever seem to find it.

Camus was right to say that one must imagine Sisyphus happy, that each time the boulder tumbles down, he walks to meet it with something like a smile, you only wish he had better explained how.

You can’t control the circumstances. The outcomes. The results. The failures or the rewards. You can’t really control much of anything. And yet, neither are you a slave to fortune or fate. You get to decide, you get to to choose, how to respond, how to react, what you will and won’t do.

You can decide what to be obsessed with. You can choose what to worship. You can design your greatest dilemma and devote yourself to it's resolve. To choose what you demand of life, what life demands of you. Not destiny, not a calling, not an outward force or an external coercion. But, a life-task, an ikigai, the overlap of our loves, our skills, our work, and what the world needs. Our reason for being.

Brush strokes. Shading and pencil lines. Words put upon a page. A sunrise, a sunset, a hand to hold, a smile, a cup of tea. A practice that sands down the edges of suffering. We are given the freedom to throw the weight of our lives behind the service of what we choose to make our own one true thing. The singular deed we push up hill relentlessly. The meaning we give to the absurd. It is enough. It is plenty. It is all we need.

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