How boring would life be if it wasn’t all by chance?
It was the usual setting for a conversation with friends about fate: the only light came from a lit anti-insect candle, beers were warming in our hands, and we sat around a wooden table on my buddy’s deck while I calculated how much money I would lose if I called out of work the next day.
I didn’t—call out that is. Part of the charm of late-night hangs is the pain of work the next day, which produces a sort of sleepy mania. It’s how I wrote basically all of On the Breeze, except usually in those writing sessions I was either hungover or still drunk from the night before, sitting staring bleary-eyed at a screen in a cubicle. I’m a little tamer two years later than I was in those days.
But last night I turned to the boys and asked them if they believe in fate. This is the kind of question I would consider insufferable if I were sober, and I owe it to the distinct brain fog that descends halfway through your third double IPA that I thought it right to ask.
Thoughts abounded. My take is that it exists, but only in small doses. I think on the grand scale, chaos reigns supreme, and it would laugh at us if it had a mouth to do it with. But it’s chaos—it’s chance—it’s impersonal. And where fate exists is in small, pivotal moments. You know the ones—they turn the gears of history. Fate intervenes by a margin of inches. Think war stories in which a guy’s flask blocks a bullet to the heart. Then that guy becomes president or something.
You know, I had imagined writing this long thing giving all these different examples of fate nudging certain things to happen, but my mind just buffers trying to think of examples, and the idea of it falls flat when I try to commit it to words. Maybe there’s something innate and human about believing in fate, at looking back and thinking that the things that happened had to have happened in that way.
That doesn’t make it any truer.
That line of thinking seems to crop up when intense things are happening, either good or bad. Falling in love feels like coming home. A health scare can make you think you’re meant to die. When you face a big, scary situation, or a big invigorating one, in both of which you feel powerless, it’s common to hear someone say “if it’s meant to be, it will be.” And we take that and hold onto it because we have to hold on to something, but the beauty is that that’s actually not true at all.
I think the truth is that it’s all chance. You might call that meaningless, nihilistic even. But to me, it just makes anything good feel like a miracle, because with every good sandwich, every avoided accident, every comfortable moment, chance smiles on you, when if it wanted to, it could just take a fat shit on your head instead.
Maybe you and your true love weren’t meant to meet at all. Instead, the paths your lives took spiraled out, doubled back on themselves, pinballed off of all kinds of things you thought were obstacles, which really just ricocheted you on to the right trajectory to fall into their orbit. What are the chances?
There’s beauty in thinking the universe conspires in your favor. But I think there’s more beauty in believing that you’re defying the equal chance of something horrible happening every time you encounter something good.
Mind you, none of this came out eloquently whatsoever in the lowlight of my buddy’s porch. I guess that wasn’t really the point of asking. If it seems like I’m omitting what my friends had to say, I do so solely out of wanting to only speak for myself. But rest assured they had thoughtful things to say, more thoughtful than I did in that state. And I found myself tilting my head back and noting how good a view we had of the stars, and how small that view made me feel, and wondering if there’s anyone that can look up and feel like there’s any sort of design with all those rabid explosions burning out so high, so far away.
And what about free will? You gotta be careful not to let this kind of thinking make you passive. Even if we don’t have a say in the matter, even if the domain of chance’s power extends all the way inside our heads, and free will is nothing but a dream, we still need to live as if not only that are choices matter, but that our choices are ours to make in the first place.
“the real truth about it is no one gets it right / the real truth about it is we’re all supposed to try” – Jason Molina, “Farewell Transmission” – RIP, to him and Steve Albini
I’m not really sure what all this adds up to. But it’s a good reminder for myself, someone that feels dissatisfied with work, dissatisfied with his fledgling music career, dissatisfied with my living situation and dissatisfied with who I am. We’re all supposed to try. What can you do beyond that?
The rest is chance. Or maybe even fate. Who am I to know?
matt nilsen 