Love Your Fate
Let me ask you a question, and be honest with yourself: how do you respond to life?
Do you find yourself generally welcoming of situations, whether they’re positive or negative? Or are you more the type to resist adverse circumstances and feel frustrated that things don’t go your way? Even more, do you complain?
While it’s certainly human nature to plan and hope for things to go our way, it’s universal nature for things to happen as they do, even if that doesn't agree with your personal view of what should happen. Think of how futile it would be for a single wave to go against the motions of the surrounding ocean (if waves could feel sensations, I’m pretty sure they’d feel burnt out extremely fast.) This is how you are when you resist your situations. You are a minuscule wave in an endless ocean. Why spend all your energy fighting circumstances instead of flowing with them?
The Stoics called preached this kind of attitude of life. Marcus Aurelius wrote that a fire continues to burn despite whatever is thrown into it. Epictetus said not to wish that anything be different, just that everything transpire the way that it does. Nearly 2,000 years later, Nietzsche would popularize this concept again in the form of “amor fati”- “love of one’s fate”. Just read this line from Nietzsche’s book Ecce Homo:
“My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity.”
Unlike Nietzsche, I don’t believe that you don't need to literally love that you’re broke, or that a loved one died, or that you’re depressed. To me, that would just be too be artificial; while it’s easy for us to love the good things in our lives, it’s hard to love the bad. Instead, I think that equanimity is the solution here. Just accept the cards dealt to you in life and work with them accordingly. By all means, improve your situation, but just don’t resist anything. “Accept it and move on” can be said for all things in life. What’s more, having faith in literal fate is not a requisite to apply this outlook of life. If you do, then great- there’s no reason to hate what you believe was meant for you. If you’re not on the side of determinism, then grab life by the balls, channel your belief in free will to a place of empowerment, and make the best out of everything that comes your way. Peeling back the layers of the concept of amor fati means realizing that things could have only turned out that one way- again, by fate or by natural consequence.
Ultimately, loving your fate is an attitude of ultimate acceptance and empowerment. Embrace what happens to you wholeheartedly and control that which you can control. Stop lamenting over could haves and would haves. Drop this idea of how reality should be for you. There is no greater mark of a human being than to make the most of what is given to him. You were endowed with reason; use it.
At the end of your life, do you really want to remember it as years of complaining and resistance? Or one that was noble, guided by your own actions to overcome adversity?
Thanks for reading,
Alan
Additional Resources
Read more about amor fati in this article by the Daily Stoic.
This video on radical acceptance (derived from Stoicism’s amor fati) can shed more light on the matter. Better Ideas is an excellent channel all around.
A detailed article explaining what radical acceptance is, is not, and how to apply it your life.
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