Is it fate that you're reading this?

In experimenting with different forms for this newsletter, this week let’s look at a couple of quotes together.

Quotes to consider:

“Nothing happens to anybody which he is not fitted by nature to bear.”

- Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

Consider that this may not be a re-telling of “everything happens for a reason” but is instead a phrase on the acceptance of our reality—regardless of whether it is purposeful or random.

We don’t need to believe that our fate has a purpose (though that can help). We can instead accept that we are observers of the universe.

“Have you also learned that secret from the river; that there is no such thing as time?” That the river is everywhere at the same time, at the source and at the mouth, at the waterfall, at the ferry, at the current, in the ocean and in the mountains, everywhere and that the present only exists for it, not the shadow of the past nor the shadow of the future."

- Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

As a river is both the source and the ocean, our lives are already the past and the future. Within the present moment exists all that will occur, and in that way, what happens to us is exactly what we are fitted to bear.

Let this bring you peace when you are troubled, and courage when you are ready.

2021-05-23