Love Your Fate

Denis Sarazhin

… At a certain moment in his (Nietzsche’s) life, the idea came to him of what he called ‘the love of your fate.’ Whatever your fate is…you say, ‘This is what I need.’ It may look like a wreck, but go at it as though it were an opportunity, a challenge. If you bring love to that moment — not discouragement — you will find the strength is there. Any disaster you can survive is an improvement in your character, your stature, and your life. What a privilege! This is when the spontaneity of your own nature will have a chance to flow.

Then…you will see that the moments which seemed to be great failures followed by wreckage were the incidents that shaped the life you have now… Nothing can happen to you that is not positive. Even though it looks and feels at the moment like a negative crisis, it is not. The crisis throws you back, and when you are required to exhibit strength, it comes.

~Joseph Campbell

*

… As most readers of books pass from cover to cover, realizing not at all that the letters which form the words are the product of painstaking craftsmanship and that the imposition of the type upon the page, the composition of the title-piece, the binding of the volume, are the result of centuries of study and design, so also we take as a matter of course the miracle of being alive, and the comings and goings of the men and women about us.

— Karl De Schweinitz

*

…Shall we permit our fellow men to know us as we now are, or shall we seek instead to remain an enigma, an uncertain quantity, wishing to be seen as something we are not?”

- Jourard

*

Refusing to appreciate our fate is common. We find fault with it. We criticize the people who led us there by cheating us out of rewards we might have had. We dwell on our losses, overlooking the expanded vision we were offered. Fate is the subject of a lot of Greek myths. They were fascinated by how trying to avoid it actually made it happen.

I can trace certain personal misfortunes, if you want to call them that, that were created by my refusal to see things that should have been obvious. But once the catastrophe happens, then what? That’s the real event. There’s where you grow larger or smaller. That’s where…