Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
Robert Frost, “The Road Not Taken” (1915)
©2008, UrbisMedia
Life is nothing if not a succession of choices. Some are big, some are small: what to major in; should I ask her/him to marry me?; or the blue shirt, or the white shirt? We often evaluate our lives by the choices we have made, proud of the good ones, regretful of the bad ones, and grateful for the ones that were more like the flip of a coin and turned out well. Sometimes the road taken leads to a good place, other times it doesn’t. But the unavoidable fact is that you can only go down one road at a time, and you can never return to quite the same place you were before. It is one of the wonders of life that we can never know for certain where we would have ended up had we taken “the other road.”
But what about “the road not open?” Life also includes roads that we would like to have had the choice to take, but that choice was denied to us.
I remember speaking with a friend one time about a job he had gotten. It had been a long time coming for him and he had complained when another job he had been turned down for didn’t work out. But later he got a job that was far better for him. Had he been accepted for the earlier job he never would have applied for what turned out to be the better one. Things can work out the other way, of course, but sometimes “things turn out for the better.”
“It was meant to be.” This is one of those curious ex post facto explanations that people give to events, usually negative events. It is a means of applying some meaning to happenstance, a way if reconciling just where one happens to be in life by seeing it as part of some purpose dictated by Fate, or God. “If I had been accepted by the university that was my first choice I would never have met the woman of my dreams.” People prefer to believe that “things happen for a reason.”
Such reasoning is, of course, mere convenient invention that assuages negative circumstances. If even bad things that happen to us appear to be part of a grander purpose or plan, then they are not as bad. But it is more that that, because the implication is that there is a plan, there is a script that we are playing out with our lives that it beyond our comprehension. If events are just random happenings in an existence that is without any apparent purpose, then just chance and luck govern our lives; the accident of our birth in America or Bangladesh, the currents in the gene pool that give us beauty, or intelligence, or health, or their opposites. Fate is something one must “accept,” but Destiny is something seems to have a connection to a greater scheme. With Fate, things happen; with Destiny, things seem to happen for a purpose. People tend to dislike meaninglessness; they would prefer to believe that things are meant to happen.
Others like to believe that their destiny is already “written” in the stars. Astrologers will ask when the exact hour of your birth occurred claiming tat they can discern all sorts of occurrences in your life as dictated by the alignments of the planets. all the They were doing this before even all the planets in our solar system were discovered and have been debunked by the simplest of tests. But people will check the newspaper each day to see whether it is a good day for a Pisces to “make an important decisions about money” or some other vague suggestion. In Asia, untold numbers of people consult fortunetellers to usually hear something that the fortune-teller assumes by means of a few questions or other clues they want to hear. But the important thing is that some people assume that their destinies are already written already pre-determined.
One can see all sorts of tricky little traps with this sort of reasoning. What about that business of “free will.” If all that happens is part of a script already written, then free will is a joke. But people of faith like to imagine that their god created them, but then their lives is like a test, or a quest. God gives you free will, but you must use it to find Him and accept him. Life is sort of an Easter egg hunt in which you must find the “correct” religion, which, of course, is usually the religion you were born into. There are people who convert to other faiths, many with a sword poised above their necks, others in order to make a marriage work, still others for business reasons, and a few who find some reason out of a personal metaphysical quest.
One can immediately see the sorts of problems this leads to. Christians believe that Muslims, for example, have been, unfortunately, put by God in the “wrong” religion, and must be helped to find their way to the “true faith.” The Muslims believe just the opposite. Since each is a threat to the other for earthly power and control—usually over territory, wealth and resources, as well as “souls”—there is often a good deal of bloodletting involved in reconciling “theological” incompatibilities.
So, we can see that, although the road through life might just be meaningless, or at least have a meaning beyond our ken, and its course may not be “written” but the pen is in our hand, there are some clues to what might come close to a form of “probabilistic destiny.” These won’t come from scripture, or astrologers or soothsayers, but they are available to a rational and reasonable intelligence.
One can read books other than the Bible, the Quran, the Torah, Bhagavad Vita, or the (really silly) Book of Mormon. Biographies, and histories, and books about science and biology, and literature and art, all have clues and information about how lives have been influenced and lived, about how biology, geography, and other dimensions of our existence, provide both limitations and potentials. These sources will not tell you what you should do with you life, but they will give you some probabilities, some guidelines, even some warnings. They won’t get rid of all the fear that is at the bottom of religious faith, but they rid you of some of it.
Some people get a better start than others down those “roads of life.” Why this is remains a mystery. It can be just the luck of the draw in the way carbon atoms get distributed and arranged in the universe, the currents in the gene pool. Some like to see the hand of a god in all of this, a god who has his own purpose in the disparities of life, or god the trickster, who likes to see if you can “find” him from among the babble of faiths. One can try to figure out, or pray for guidance in what your destiny is supposed to be. But you can also do your best to understand “the hand you have been dealt” and where you are, and try to make the best choices toward a “destiny” you choose for your life. You might not get it, but we should remember this: priests, astrologers and soothsayers don’t give you money back guarantees either. If you stand at a fork in the road and ask a stranger which one you should take, he is going to ask you “where do you want to go.” You can ask him to pray with you for guidance, or if he just might have a map.
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© 2008, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 7.11.2008)