Freedom and Destiny
“It was destined to go like this”. How many times have we heard this sentence, which certainly is right in the top ten of the most repeated clichés. A misfortune happens and this is the answer. Things are bad or at least not as we would have hoped, and we blame it on fate. Well, do you know what my answer is when faced with such statements? “Bullshits!”. Yes, forgive the Frenchism but, if among the many NO-Xs (no vax, no tav, no tap, no gas etc etc) of the moment there was also a movement called NO-Destiny, which by statute fights clichés like “Was written that it would end like this ”, well I would be the national, European and world president.
There is nothing you hate more than closing a negative experience (but also a positive one if you like) with such a sentence; that then, if you notice, we are always very inclined to blame destiny for things that go wrong, and instead we mention it very little when they go well. I wonder why! Or rather, we know why: destiny is the biggest scapegoat since the Neanderthals, a sort of great “bad company” in the history of man to which all our failures, the great ones as a society and the personal ones, are saddled with.
But…
But this is not the case: just as it was not fate that triggered the Second World War, in the same way it is not fate that makes our small personal projects fail, from work to relationships. Destiny at its best is a silent background to a scene in which only us, men and women, are actors, screenwriters and directors.
In religion we speak of free will. Here I am of this will, as free as possible, I have made “my” religion. But be careful not to fall into the simplification of those who believe that what is free is also simple. It is an absolutely superficial concept of freedom. Freedom is something heavy, very heavy I would say. It is in fact a concept that is “counterbalanced” by responsibility; the more freedom we ask of our life, the more it is leveled, on the opposite side of the scale, by the responsibility that we must express with our actions. I am free, I have always been free, because at the same time, I was also then responsible for fully assuming responsibility for my actions, where my choice of freedom had led to damage, loss, something negative.
And here is linked the third concept which is that of fear, which I had already talked about in this post; freedom, as mentioned, balances with responsibility, but there is a third inconvenience, namely fear, which can upset this precarious balance, sterilizing our free will. I can be as free as I like but if I am afraid I do not move, I do not act, I limit my freedom because I am afraid of the consequences of it. And so I renounce that free will, the nerve center of my personal religion.
The ideal
The ideal would be to know how to mix freedom, responsibility and fear in the right doses, without making any of the three prevail, as in a recipe in which, when the ingredients are measured by the gram, and only in that case, the dish final that comes out is absolute goodness. Here, I am firmly convinced that an incredible life is nothing more than the fruit of the exact leveling of freedom, responsibility and fear. The problem is that the quantities are not the same for everyone. But, good news, thank goodness you can make a mistake in life without necessarily ending up in the cage for the rest of our days and therefore, each of us has time and opportunity to understand what the right level of freedom, responsibility and fear is that can help him live better. He must experiment, without, as mentioned, entrusting the meaning of his days to destiny.
But, yes there is a very important “but” in this speech, I would not be completely sincere if I did not reveal to you an important facet of this question, namely that I am as much averse to the concept of “destiny” as I am tied to a a concept, similar and different at the same time, which is that of the “pre-destination”. I try to explain myself. It is not destined that tomorrow I will fall down the stairs on my way out of the house, I can pay more attention to it and avoid injury. While it was predestined that, to give some popular examples, Roberto Baggio would become the champion he was, that Van Gogh would become the artist known all over the world he is today, that a head like Einstein would come to reveal the whole universe to us. Even in the small, or in the lives of us ordinary people, there are many forms of predestination, in personal and work fulfillment, such as, for example, in the birth of some relationships: it is sometimes said, “those two seem to be made for each other. other”! Here in these cases I can detect a sort of predestination, understood as an innate talent that each of us carries from birth, and that each of us must recognize (the hardest part) and cultivate.
Talent
This talent will inevitably lead us, sooner or later, to live experiences because we are pre-destined, and there is no cosmic force that can counteract their occurrence.
And who is born without these talents? No fear, I have reached an age where I feel I can say that you can live a good life even when you are devoid of any form of predestination. In these cases we will only have to commit ourselves, a little more, to making things happen, not relying on chance, heaven, destiny. Taking risks and honors of our choices. A courageous choice that, however, I assure you, gives greater depth to our days. A depth that can be savored, even when one is wrong, even when one fails; having the courage to leave the spectator seats and go up on the stage of our life. Acting off the cuff because no one has the script, but what a show guys!
