I have a saying of my own:
“Everything that happened in your past is fate. Everything that happens in your future is destiny. Today is where fate becomes destiny.”
I’m not entirely sure when I came up with it. Perhaps that is appropriate. Some ideas arrive when we are looking for them. Others simply turn up while we are busy living our lives.
The older we become, the more interesting the past becomes.
Not necessarily because we remember it better. Quite the opposite. Memory has a mischievous habit of editing our lives. Some things we remember vividly; others have disappeared almost completely. A person we once knew intimately can become a distant name. A conversation that seemed insignificant at the time can, years later, seem like the moment everything changed.
And then there are the things we never planned.
Nobody plans every person who will enter their life. Nobody knows which chance encounter will become important, which decision will change their direction, or which apparently insignificant event will eventually become part of the story they tell about themselves.
Looking backwards, however, it can all seem inevitable.
That is the strange thing about the past.
Once something has happened, there is no longer any uncertainty about it. The possibilities have collapsed into one reality. We can regret it, celebrate it, learn from it or wish desperately that it had been different – but we cannot make it unhappen.
Perhaps that is what I mean by fate.
Not that everything was predetermined. I don’t believe that.
Rather, the past is fate because it is now fixed. It is the collection of events that made us the people we are, whether we chose them or they happened to us.
The future is different.
The future is full of possibilities.
We can make plans, of course. We make them constantly. We plan careers, marriages, houses, holidays and retirements. We make five-year plans and ten-year plans, and occasionally plans for things we will probably never do.
And then life laughs.
John Lennon put it rather better:
“Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.”
He understood something that most of us eventually discover. We imagine that our lives are the plans we make.
They aren’t.
Our lives are what actually happens.
So perhaps destiny isn’t a predetermined destination after all. Perhaps it is simply the future that emerges from the choices we make, the circumstances we encounter and the unexpected turns that life throws at us.
And that brings us to today.
Today is a peculiar little place.
Yesterday is gone. Tomorrow hasn’t arrived. We exist in the narrow space between them, often worrying about tomorrow while carrying yesterday around with us.
Yet today is the only part we can actually influence.
The mistakes of yesterday may have shaped us, but they don’t have to imprison us.
The possibilities of tomorrow may excite us, frighten us or seem completely unknowable, but they haven’t happened yet.
Today is the hinge.
It is where experience meets possibility.
Where memory meets hope.
Where what has happened meets what might happen.
Where fate becomes destiny.
Perhaps that is why we should be careful about dismissing an ordinary day.
We tend to think the important days of our lives will announce themselves.
They rarely do.
A day that seems completely unremarkable may contain a conversation that changes everything. A decision made over breakfast may alter the course of a life. A stranger may become a friend. A passing thought may become an idea. An opportunity may appear and disappear before we even recognise it as an opportunity.
We won’t know until afterwards.
And that is the great trick of living.
We only understand the significance of some moments by looking backwards.
But we don’t have the luxury of looking backwards when we are living them.
We have to make our decisions without knowing how the story ends.
Perhaps that is what makes life both frightening and wonderful.
We are all writing a story whose final chapter we cannot read.
The past is already written.
The future is waiting.
And today?
Today we have the pen.
Everything that happened in your past is fate. Everything that happens in your future is destiny. Today is where fate becomes destiny.
Perhaps that’s all we really need to know.
For today, at least.
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@ Michael Taylor: Bit worried here Michael ….. you have suddenly become all philosophical rather than pragmatic. Has Carol reduced your daily dose of fine red wines??
Regardless; I can appreciate your sentiments expressed here from events in my own life. Two examples for private discussion over a bottle of Coonawarra red and an excellent dinner would be ideal.
Michael; Thank you for such an interesting post. Actually you have channeled my thoughts exactly except you have transferred my thoughts into concise words (better than mine) for others to consider. A minor difference of view is that I consider my past, present and future to be pre-ordained by an entity that is beyond human perception. I am just the vehicle for whatever that entity has pre-destined.
Thank you for your post, Michel. My understanding is that fate means something that happens which we can’t control. To me the past is mainly a result of our deliberate actions for which we are responsible.
Live in the now? Personally, my future plans go no further than what’s for dinner.I don’t even buy green bananas.