Fate chooses your relationships, you choose your friends.
Jacques Delille
Ah, choice and fate. Two fascinating concepts about which endless things can be spoken and written and contemplated. From the great Greek Tragedies to Wheel of Fortune, we experience the impact of both.
Choice seems to empower me. Knowing I have choice seems to make you feel more in control and FATE feels like you have no control and are completely at the mercy of unidentified forces. Right? and if fate is that powerful, HAVE MERCY!
FATE CHOSE MY FAMILY!
ITS NOT ANY ONE’S FAULT.
GOOD OR BAD,
DEAL WITH IT!
At any holiday season the nature of family arises to the fore and many times we dread and eagerly await the family assembly. Our buttons get pushed, or we push another’s, we like it, we hate it, we have always have ample opportunity to get hurt and get loved, to hurt and to love. Sometimes we hide, we avoid, we ignore. We sit in wait. We relinquish satisfaction and eat to stupefaction. We celebrate. After all, family is fate.
What is fate? Is it a collision of molecules that unite on the time/space continuum in an irrefutable way?
What is choice? Is it the opportunity to select or refute what is present before us?
Where does what fate chooses intersect with you who chooses?
Where and how do fate and karma connect? Is Fate Karma? Do eastern spiritual paths entertain Fate as an element either separate from karma or at all? I don’t actually know the answer to this question so if you do, please respond here. I am curious.
If fate chooses our relationships-specifically those to whom we are related, then what is our destiny in relation to our relations? What is our task? Is our task our choice or karmic debt? Or both?
Say you are born into a dysfunctional family where for centuries, the same dysfunction has been handed down: A family where all the girls are pregnant teens, generation after generation. A family where there is extraordinary wealth with shameful sex addictions or a family with a cycle of emotional abuse.
Did fate choose you to be born into your particular family? Did you choose it before incarnating to grow spiritually?
Is Fate a synonym for God?
Let’s number these questions:
- What do you do with the situation?
- How does what you do with the situation change if the questions above are answered one way or the other?
- Does knowing who choose this help you navigate through the challenges?
Sometimes we can find the answer to #3 by pretending to answer #2 with several different answers and checking to see if a helpful idea arises to cope with the struggle.
If Fate is God-then what might God have in mind for you to do?
If Fate is Karma, then you may be directly responsible for being in this situation and the balancing of it maybe a wonderful healing for you and others.
If You chose it before incarnating, then surely you did so for growth.
Pick an inspiring answer here. Contemplate this: What if I chose my family as my friends?