Can you believe in destiny,
While disbelieving an interventionist God?
God, I’m afraid, is not in my heart. As much as I would love to have faith in a higher purpose, a soul beyond the life of my body, a greater point and meaning to my existence, it is simply not within me.
But I’ve always had a strong and unshakeable sense of predestination in my life. Life always seems to carry me to where I believe I must ultimately be, always seems to offer me a helping hand when I need one, if not always as quickly as I’d like.
Can you have predestination without an interventionist God? Does this dichotomy suggest a valid faith I can’t find it in myself to have? Or is my notion of predestination at fault?
And if my feeling of predestination, of synchronicity is at fault, then why is it there?
Could the sense of a force guiding me along life’s tricky and difficult road be an illusion?
Soul train
Another year passes and for me another project does too. Time to find a new assignment to pay the bills. My CV goes in for an array of glitzy, well-paid gigs in awesome locations where I’d be living the dream for a few months but putting my life on hold at the same time, sacrificing the strategic stuff I should be getting on with.
But, to quote Ruddigore “In a garden full of roses lies a violet half-hidden.” An assignment that doesn’t necessarily attract me but which ticks all the boxes for my life right now is in the mix. A location it would be useful for me to be working in, skills that are useful to be refreshing, work that won’t be too demanding and which will look good on my résumé, and a rate well within my ballpark.
And with the inevitability of a Gilbert and Sullivan libretto, in spite of some efforts to the contrary, that’s the door I ended up walking through.
And that can be said of so many of the decision points in my life. The totally bizarre friend of a friend of a friend call that got me the ideal first job, a chance conversation with an old mate that started me freelancing, the perfect first boat that I didn’t go to see but which the broker happened to have on the market in the same marina.
Whenever I’m at a crossroads I always seem to end up being drawn down the “right” path.
Perspective Bias
Certainly, when people talk of synchronicity or predestination in their lives they do seem to discount the 99% of life’s events that do not serve that narrative and focus on the 1% of possibly coincidental events that do.
Perhaps we simply ascribe far too much value to those few fortunate coincidences?
Who says what’s right anyway?
While many of us battle an excess of negativity in our lives it is ingrained in our natures to talk ourselves up and focus on the positive at times. Are we perhaps persuading ourselves that every major choice was the right one?
The fact that we did one thing at one point in our lives makes any conclusions about the alternatives, good or bad, totally invalid. As I’ve written elsewhere the very act of taking one job may mean you didn’t get run over by a bus while popping out for lunch at the other.
But it could just as easily mean you might have missed the opportunity to become a multi-millionaire too.
A sense of Story
Everyone loves a story and some of the most interesting people we meet are those who can spin a great yarn, particularly about themselves. We love the story of our own lives and events that add to it.
Perhaps that notion of predestination is simply a facet of that sense of story; that we focus on the events that build a narrative and it is merely our misconception that they are in fact serving one.
Programmed behaviour
As Freud (nearly) said “Trust your instincts for the big stuff.” We discover a “self” as we grow up, which, depending on the blessings or otherwise of our DNA and environment, may create a gulf between the person we are and the one we believe we should be.
It entirely makes sense that we are programmed to discover a sense of purpose, seek out role models, learn what we respect and what those around us respect; that we seek to define ourselves. Aspirations are how we find our place in society and our role as an adult. In simpler times and smaller social circles that definition would almost certainly be within the confines of our immediate physical community and therefore most likely within our reach without the conspicuous hand of fate helping us along.
In a richer, more complex world that aspirational self we find may be some way out of our reach simply because our “peer group” is so much larger and contains so many more exceptional individuals.
When life appears to lend us a helping hand we ascribe that to synchronicity, to destiny. Perhaps this is something we simply need more today because so many more of us aspire to that which is further beyond us. And it comforts us to think the challenging journey we have chosen is being judged the right one by an invisible guiding hand.
It also suggests another, and perhaps more convincing explanation. Perhaps it isn’t fate that’s making those choices but our own subconscious minds. The same instincts that define our goals, without our conscious awareness, orchestrate the choices that appear to present themselves to us in an equally unobserved way. It is not an external guiding hand shaping the choices that life seems to offer us but it is our own subconscious reaction to them that controls the winners and the losers. We simply subconsciously pursue that which seems “right” for us with more passion.
Soul-less train
So no road to Damascus conversion for me then. My notion of predestination is most surely at fault. Predestination is there for sure. But it’s within ourselves, not without.