I’m grooving to an album slated to hit the real and virtual racks this coming Friday. It’s country and rock, plaintive and powerful, with harmony-laden songs that long, at least in part, for the idealized innocence most everyone remembers themselves having when young. There’s more to it than that, of course, but for the moment it’s a supple soundtrack for the stretch of hours that run from late night to early morn, aka the time when deep thoughts abound.
For example, although used interchangeably by most, fate and destiny are not one and the same. Fate is a pre-ordained result; our actions matter not—to borrow a line from a Doris Day song from the 1950s, “Whatever will be, will be.” Destiny, on the other hand, adds a degree of personal responsibility to the equation; in essence, we shape our tomorrows by what we do today. (For those curious, Google’s Gemini AI tool offers a succinct summary of the similarities and differences between the two; click here for that.)
Did all my yesterdays lead me here? Of course. Was it fate? My destiny? A fluke? I assumed, while in college, that I’d write the Great American Novel by the time I turned 30. Granted, such hubris is the domain of the young, but it’s something I clung to until…well, until I didn’t. Life’s demands sometimes force us to downshift our dreams, unfortunately. But was that failure part of some grand unforeseen plan that eventually led to this blog, where I often use reviews of albums and songs as springboards for philosophical musings? Perhaps. Perhaps not. I don’t know. I’ll never know.
One of my favorite poems, “The Idea of Order at Key West” by Wallace Stevens, explores how we project order and reason onto the oft-chaotic world around us. The same rings true of life writ large, I think. We attribute success, failure, love and more to fate, destiny and such things as drive and talent (or lack thereof), while crediting happenstance for the achievements of those we dismiss as hacks—and we all know hacks, be they in business, literature, music or politics. (Incompetence rises to the top, does it not?)
All that said, I do believe—to a degree—in destiny. Our yesterdays and todays do indeed build the stage for our tomorrows. Serendipity, however, is an equal actor in the play that is life. So while we put ourselves in a position to win by purchasing a lottery ticket, it’s left to luck as to whether we hit it big.
The Old Grey Cat 