Fate

This poem explores the uncertain relationship between fate and personal agency.

Some experiences seem almost impossibly orchestrated, while others collapse despite our best efforts. Still others appear to depend entirely upon our willingness to act.

Rather than deciding which force governs our lives, the poem settles into a humbler proposition: do what is ours to do, accept what is not, and participate as fully as we can in whatever unfolds.

I have never been entirely sure what I believe about fate.

There have been moments in my life when circumstances aligned with such improbable elegance that they felt almost choreographed:

“Through intricate ballet
Of circumstances
Too poetic
To be unarranged”

I understand that improbability does not prove intention. Human beings are extraordinarily good at finding patterns and constructing meaning from what happens to us.

And yet, sometimes the poetry of an experience is difficult for me to dismiss.

Then there have been other moments when I did everything I knew how to do and watched carefully strategized and nurtured outcomes collapse anyway. Whatever control I thought I possessed turned out to be far more limited than I had imagined.

And still other experiences have taught me almost the opposite lesson:

“That nothing happens
Without decided actions
And no sudden
Grand rescues”

Sometimes waiting for life to intervene is simply waiting.

Those experiences leave me suspended somewhere between fate and agency.

I don't know how much of life is orchestrated, accidental, inevitable, or created through our choices. Perhaps those categories are not even as separate as I imagine them to be.

The only thing I actually can know is that I am a participant.

That is why the poem eventually stops trying to explain fate and instead asks how I might live amid the uncertainty:

“Do your best
From day to day
Living humbly here”

Humility feels important because both extremes can overstate our position. Believing everything is destined can diminish our agency. Believing everything is ours to determine can ignore how much of life remains beyond our control.

The final image offers another way of holding both:

“Accept your part
Striving to make art
In this grand-staged
Fateful play”

What matters most to me here is the attempt to "make art" of whatever circumstances arise.

That asks for something more than acceptance, but something different from control. Acceptance alone can become passive. Control attempts to force life into a predetermined shape. Creation requires participation: responding to what is actually present while still bringing our own intention, imagination, and authorship to what happens next.

Perhaps that is the relationship between fate and agency that feels truest to me.

I cannot choose all of the material life gives me. But neither am I limited to merely receiving it.

I can meet it.

I can shape it.

I can allow it to shape me.

And somewhere within that exchange, perhaps a life becomes less something either fate or I create alone, and more an art we continually make together.