Tag: dailyprompt-1864

No Fate

Daily writing prompt
Do you believe in fate/destiny?
View all responses

I used to believe in destiny. When I was younger (in my 20s and 30s) I felt that certain relationships in my life were fated to be. These were dramatic relationships with equal parts elation and turmoil. In their time, each relationship was The One. Until they weren’t.

Photo by ROMAN ODINTSOV on Pexels.com

Nowadays, I think destiny was the artifact of bipolar disorder. When one is elated, one believes in destiny, a shining path toward a happy ending. One never gets the happy ending, because one is stretched to an irritable attenuation, and then goes skidding into depression. Destiny dissipates in depression.

Nowadays (with age and medication), I don’t believe in destiny. I don’t want to believe in destiny. It is a destabilizing influence. I would rather have this mundane life without destiny. I can read about destiny in books, where it is safely captured in the pages.

Destiny is Tricky

Daily writing prompt
Do you believe in fate/destiny?
View all responses

I don’t believe in destiny. Or, rather, I believe in something destiny-adjacent. Not the deterministic concept of fate delivering us to our inevitable outcome, but a leading we could be taking.

Leading is a Quaker concept, the belief that God (or whatever divine presence you believe in) is leading us toward an action we need to make. These often point toward right action, or ways in which we can do God’s will. (Keep in mind that God’s will in this case is not the evangelical/supremacist vision, but defending people’s rights, feeding and clothing them, bringing the peaceable kingdom to earth. Pacifist and progressive.)

Leadings can be life disrupting, although I have never had one that defines as that. Quakers have clearness committees so that they can tell whether a leading is divine or just a whim or mistaken desire. Clearness committees are not perfect — I had a clearness committee for my first marriage and it blew up in three years.

I sometimes think writing is a leading. Why else would I write for no monetary recompense and very few readers? I may be called to put on paper the adventures of an agricultural collective and its preternatural visitors, dealing with topics like pacifism and discrimination. I don’t know — it’s been years since I’ve been to meeting and I don’t have a meeting to seek clearness with it. It’s also not disruptive enough to my life — if I wanted to quit work for writing full-time, I would certainly ask for a clearness committee.

I don’t believe in destiny, the belief that we have no control over what happens to us and we’re dragged kicking and screaming into our future. But I believe in leadings.