All of this, of course, concerns character—that orchestration of qualities that define a person and secretly spin, measure, and cut the thread of his or her fate. All good so far. The plot thickens, however, when we recognize that the challenges that step forward to meet us are just that. They test us to our marrow, less offering us the opportunity to improve than demanding it. When we have been complacent for too long, the gods arrange to bring us what Florence Scovel Shinn calls “a big situation,” or crisis, for it is in the fire of crisis that character is forged and tempered. If we would only accept the instruction implicit in our predicament rather than madly trying to banish it, we might shorten the curriculum and be graduated in the blink of an eye.

In the film, Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium, Dustin Hoffman’s character, Mr. Magorium, senses his impending death, and breaks the news to Natalie Portman’s character, whom he has grown to love as a daughter. She becomes distressed, not wanting him to go, as she loves him in return. His parting words to her, meant to help her overcome the self-doubt that has plagued her up to that point, are simply: “Your life is an occasion. Rise to it.” Setting out on the path of excellence means that we recognize that we have no more important work in the world than the cultivation of our character through the five points of fate practice. Doing the best we can, each day, to walk the path of humility places our feet firmly on the path of excellence. It gives us all we need to rise to the uniquely wonderful occasion that is our life.

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God created man because He loves stories. – Elie Wiesel

As a writer of fiction, I’ve often played with the idea that life is a story in which each of us is the protagonist. I’ve wondered what might happen if a character in a novel suddenly chose not to cooperate with the plot, how our lives would change if we began regarding ourselves as characters in a great narrative with the option at any point to cooperate or resist, how we might use our experiences to work through the arc and resolution of our life, and how all of this might affect the denouement of our time in this world.

The whole idea of life as a story presumes an audience, someone to whom the story is being told, which implies an eternal point of view—the vantage of the gods. Storytelling is, of course, one of the oldest art forms, and one in which the Greeks excelled, as they did in so many things. Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, for example, were memorized and recited for centuries before they were written, and no stories were more riveting than those told in the plays of Sophocles, Aeschylus, and Euripides. In the works of these great narrators, a person’s life could take on epic meaning as he battled mythical creatures, escaped magic spells at the last moment, or conversed with shapeshifting gods, and in all of these larger-than-life events, audiences could be reminded of the greatness that lies within each of us when we choose to cooperate with the story of our life. In this sense, perhaps our life story is not something we choose as much as something that chooses us.

The book sits on the desk, a finished work. As a reader, I can skip ahead, even peek at the ending and ruin the experience—but the characters in the book have no such option. The pages are for them as the days are for us, and they can only live each one as it comes to life in the reading of it. Their destiny lies some hundreds of pages ahead, at the end of the book, but they must face their choices with no idea of how things will turn out. And so must we.

Good characters cooperate, playing their part in the tale willingly, but as any novelist will tell you, there are no guarantees. The best writing is more a matter of taking dictation from the daimon than of “making up” this or that, and to this extent, the writer hardly is in charge. Imagine a character showing up who refused to play his cards, who sat down somewhere on the page and would not budge. Such an act of defiance hardly would be pleasing to the author. It is, after all, a great satisfaction for the creator of the work when the characters accept their lot and move along the arc of literary experience to the resolution of conflict and the story’s fulfillment in a surge of meaning that touches our hearts, inspires us, even changes us for the better in some way. Perhaps the gods also appreciate our willingness to be here, to live our life fully, to show up, to honor and participate in our story with as much excellence as we can find in ourselves. Even if the end of our story is in some sense already written, even if that ending is inevitable, we cannot see ahead to the story’s end, and so must live each moment as though it held within itself the secret of an outcome. And if we choose to play our role well, with humility, do we not have reason to expect that our choice will be pleasing to the gods, who all our life, write and rewrite us?

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But creativity does not belong exclusively to artists. In all areas of life, we are called upon to respond creatively to situations, to meet them on new terms, to discover ingenious solutions to problems of every sort. To the extent that we live creatively, open to divine inspiration, we demonstrate phronesis or “practical wisdom,” and our life becomes like a work of art—beautiful, inspired and inspiring expression of what the Greeks called eudaimonia, best translated as “human flourishing.”

In practice, we see that when we operate through our will, when our actions and responses do not take the divine into account, we cut ourselves off from inspiration. Closed to anything beyond our own preconceptions, conclusions, judgments, and assumptions, we become frustrated and react by applying more force. A vicious cycle commences that wraps itself around our spirit like the deadly coils of a constrictor. The daimon is telling us the way out, even as we slip further into resistance and willfulness, but we are not listening. The project, the conversation, the moment has become ugly, for we have turned our back on inspiration and that excellence that is available to us as long as we remain open to receiving it.

To inspire is to fill with breath, and breath is life. When the daimon inspires us, it fills us with life, but it will never inspire us against our will. We must give it right of way. In this sense, humility is the path of life; hubris, of death, for our will kills us by degrees until we learn, if we do, that we have an unfailing ally to whom we can turn at any and every moment, an artist who stands ready to make our life a beautiful and inspired work. Even if we learn this the hard way, through pushing our will to the edge, there is the saving grace that our will itself, pushed far enough, will lead us, through exhaustion, to humility and to the unfailing genius of the divine.

*For a wonderful talk on creative genius by author Elizabeth Gilbert, click here. Thanks to Jimi Millikan for the link. Also highly recommended: Jimi’s extraordinary essay, The Golden Chalice: Secrets of Time and Creativity

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All of this got me to thinking about Independence Day, about the throwing off of tyranny, and the much lauded “freedom” prized so highly in these United States that we regard it as sacred and even send our children off to dubious wars to die (in war’s many ways) in its name. “Freedom” is a such a funny word. One notices that it never stands alone, as a virtue like, say honesty or humility or diligence, but only in relation to something else, and so freedom is always “freedom from—” or “freedom to—.” One can be “free from” or “free of” something, or “free to” engage in this or that pursuit, but taken in isolation, freedom becomes a cipher, a glittering generality—in a word, meaningless. On 04 July, we Americans wave our flags, light our sparklers, and sing the praises of freedom largely in the sense of “freedom from.” Historically this was freedom from British rule, but by extension, also freedom from tyranny and oppression of any sort, though apparently this does not include the tyranny of usurious credit card company practices or the oppression of having to choose, year after year, between health care and paying the mortgage. We are, in this sense, free to run up as much debt as we can stand. One can always declare bankruptcy, go back to sleep, and resume the American Dream—and if one is a company, this freedom is even subsidized by massive government bailouts that have to be subsidized by taxing the unborn—those whose parents and grandparents not so freely lost their home equity and the hard earned family wealth to “our way of life,” a way that has become increasingly defined by shameless Wall Street bonuses and a state sanctioned freedom to purse the quick buck by any and all means. All in all, as a nation, we have much to make noise about.

In practical terms, the “freedom to” part of the equation seems far less clear, apart from the freedom to wake up babies and startle old people when summer starts. Defenders of this preposition usually revert to talking about freedom from—pointing out how much worse it is in countries ruled by totalitarian regimes, and in this, of course, they’re right. People who are merely struggling, whom the government has forgotten, who can’t make ends meet, who have lost their homes or can’t find work or afford to take their child to the doctor are not being arbitrarily arrested, like the outspoken mayor in Listvyanka, Tatyana Kazakova, and certainly they are at least this much better off, but this is not really “freedom to,” and one begins to wonder if all freedom doesn’t amount to “freedom from.” Some suggest that we are, for example, free to practice the religion of our choosing without the danger of governmental intrusion, but this comes down once again to a “freedom from,” for even those living under the fist of a dictatorship are free to practice their religion, whatever it may be—they just had better think twice before practicing it openly, for the freedom they lack is not the freedom to practice, but the freedom from dire consequences for doing so.

This may appear at first blush to be a matter of semantics, but there is more to it. Freedom, ultimately (and one doesn’t have to examine the matter for long to get to this) is Socratic. I mean by this that, while we may be aware of the many things from which we wish to be free—such as oppression, cruelty, an egregiously unfair distribution of the national wealth, taxation without representation, debt, and so on—it is something else to state clearly what “freedom to” covers. Just as Socrates could help others become clear that what they had thought was true indeed was not true, but could not himself provide any truth beyond the truth of ignorance, so we may find that we are at a loss to understand freedom beyond negation, beyond “freedom from.”

This is no accident. “Freedom to” remains elusive, and continues to succumb to the gravitational pull of “freedom from” for the simplest of reasons: We are not “free to” at all. On this day more than others, we are in a position to recognize that freedom is independence, and that as mortals, we are utterly dependent. Our physiology, our health, our life span, the spinning of our planet and its relative immunity from lethal asteroids, whether fortune will follow us or fail us—these are just a few of countless factors continually being juggled by the gods, on whom we must depend each moment at every turn.

There is, however, a choice we are free to make, and that is the choice between humility and hubris. If we choose hubris, we ignore our dependence and the suffering commences. Choosing humility, on the other hand, means choosing to be truthful, to show up and stay innocent, to be diligent, to give ourselves in dialogue to the continuing arrival of truth in our lives—in short, to live within the awareness of our dependence on something greater.

We Americans seem ever infatuated with the loud, the big, and the flashy, with being the “greatest,” the “best,” and the first. It’s our national style, but it walks the line of hubris too closely. Humility doesn’t wave flags much. It tends to be soft spoken rather than loud, slow to react rather than boisterous, watchful and mindful of how little it knows rather than judgmental or complacent. It really isn’t very American, but perhaps it could catch on as we continue to learn the hard way the price of believing in the myth of independence.

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Once I was sitting with a young man talking about recent developments in his life, when a beautiful young woman walked by our table. “Wow,” he said, “I’d love to be with her.” I replied, “Would you? Even though you don’t know anything about her? You might hate it.” I suspect that the difference in our responses had something to do with the difference in our ages, for as we get older we see again and again how something we wanted deeply, passionately, and without the slightest hesitation turned out to be more curse than blessing. The experience is humbling, and leads to that way of being that learns to trust the inner voice more than even the fiercest appetite. Like Socrates, we come to know that we don’t know. Often, the thing that has captivated our attention proves to be nothing at all like what we wanted; it only looked like it was. Plato’s whole philosophy hangs on this distinction between reality and appearance, and we can understand Socrates’s mission as an imperative to expose the reality of ignorance underlying the appearance of knowledge in those who mistakenly believed themselves to be in possession of truth.

Realizing that we’re poor judges at best of whether something or someone will live up to our desires or expectations, we notice two things: first, that all we can truly say about what we want must be said in general terms—a sense of purpose, a romantic partner, to help others, and so on—and second, that on the path of fate practice we must take up the same sort of ironic relationship toward our desires that Socrates did toward knowing, for just as Socrates was unable to give people knowledge but ever able to point out to them their ignorance, so we may be able to identify what we don’t want, but be unable to know with any certainty whether or not a given situation will turn out to be what our desire would like it to be. We can’t point to anything in the world and know, “This is right for me; this is my good.” It remains to be seen, and this must always be true, since tomorrow, the next hour, even the next moment can change everything.

To take up an ironic relationship with our desire means that we’re truthful about what we want and diligent in doing our part to see the desire through to fulfillment, but with the awareness that we really don’t know whether a particular “this” is indeed what we’d like it to be, and therefore whether the granting of our wish will bring us a desirable outcome or something else, The wise course, then, before we act, is to consult the inner oracle, the daimon, to see if it endorses our moving forward or not, for to allow our desires to trick us into thinking we know something that we don’t know, to assume that something is so just because we want it to be so, is to make the mistake that Socrates spent his life correcting. It is the mistake of hubris and willfulness, and it leads to suffering. On the other hand, if the daimon has no objections, we may proceed confidently, even knowing that we don’t know, aware that we are dealing with educated guesswork and that our guesses may be in for more educating. As long as desire and diligence are willing to yield to whatever truth comes to light, even if that truth is disappointing, our feet will stay safely on the path of humility, and however things turn out, fate will be on our side.

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It seems that in the model the chaotic forces that are the domain of the Gods are the concrete events of the world – the “it” domain (my feeble, undoubtedly wrong interpretation). I was wondering if those forces would equally include the more subtle realms – like thought, emotion, etc. It seems on the face of it that at times emotions are hardly less subject to my will than a thunder storm and that good fate practice would consider them (potentially) outside the limits of the will. Reflecting on this a bit further, I realize that it may be that these more subtle events are in some ways at some times subject to my will and others not, and that good diligence is simply to know the limits of this. Sometimes it seems that I can simply choose a perspective or thought or even emotion about something, other times it feels like I am don Quixote, trying to make choices of such things. What say ye?

Here’s my reply to Geoff:

It’s certainly true that there are times when we feel that we have no control over emotions or thoughts, but the fact that these occur in the realm of our inner life would render them subject, ultimately, to character and choice to a point. That point is the point past which character can no longer be reformed, because one has gone too far down a path, and the consequences have become in practical terms inevitable. So, to the extent that we can develop our character, improve it, revise or even reform it, we should find those emotions/thoughts settling down. It seems obvious that hubris and humility would produce different emotional experiences, same with willfulness and willingness, and so on. So while we may not be able to control a certain feeling at a given time, that feeling, by virtue of belonging to our inner life, would be regarded as an issue to be resolved by making better choices, the idea being that such feelings/thoughts are only inevitable commensurate with whatever character choices we’ve made up to that point. Then the whole system is limited by the idea (Aristotle’s) that (as some scholars hold, he tells us), there is a point past which choice no longer operates. For these reasons having to do with inwardness, character, and choice, we would not automatically assign such inner experiences to the more general workings of “chaos” within the fate model.

Of course, we must live as though it is never to late to improve, even if Aristotle is right in theory. The time for practice always is now, and whether or not we have passed the point where a certain fate has become inevitable must be left to the gods.

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When we push against anything, when we insist and resist, ultimately it is ourselves that we are pushing against. Faced with the consequences of hubris, we may feel that the way out is to push harder. This shows up in situations, for example, where someone agrees to enable someone else’s character deficiencies. Modern psychology describes such relationships, whether personal or professional, as “codependent.” The enabler may initially make all manner of excuses for the person who is routinely violating one or more of the points of fate practice—not being diligent or truthful or available for example. Under the hand of the dialectic, the situation grows worse. It becomes increasingly demanding, requiring ever more elaborate denials, until the enabler must double and redouble his or her efforts to keep the truth at bay and the doomed ship afloat. But as our own character is the driving force behind the very consequences we may be working so hard to mitigate, the more we push, the more we bring those consequences down upon us. It is a self-evident truth, yet hubris misses it at every turn: We can never run fast enough to outrun ourselves. Anything we are pushing against, sooner or later pushes back.

If we find ourselves met by resistance frequently, struggling chronically, frustrated again and again, and especially if our situation persists no matter how hard we try, we will do well to take a step back, take a breath, and take stock of things—and consider that it may be our trying itself that keeps recreating the problem! There is a time to stop trying, and many forms of trying set us against ourselves, the truth, and the gods. This is where the dialectic saves us (though we may feel that it’s throttling us), for what is dialectical contains within itself from the very beginning the seeds of its own undoing. At some point, willfulness will fail, but perhaps we do not need to push things that far. We get to choose our teacher in this all-important curriculum, for we are free to embrace the truth that sets us free through willingness or through exhaustion. There is little doubt, however, that the sooner we put down our will and come into the company of the truth that has been staring us in the face all along, the better.

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But our critic would be mistaken in alleging that “meant to be” (or its variant, “not meant to be”) are mere tautologies. In fact, while appearing tautological, it turns out that they are giving us information about the world, and information of a most important kind, for the claim, if allowed, has a profound effect on how we approach and move through the world.

Our theory and practice resolves the traditional contradiction between fate and free will by holding that free will is the instrument of our fate. We borrow from Aristotle when we point out what sounds like another tautology, namely that our choices determine our fate until they do not, which means that we recognize a point past which the consequences of a given choice can no longer be averted through self-improvement. In this, the gods are generous, and taking the path of humility even in the proverbial eleventh hour can spare us the effects of willfulness and hubris, or greatly lessen their severity. Even so, there is a point past which the consequences of our choices become inevitable, and what we have set into motion must return to us, like a boomerang. Even in this, the grace of the divine hand is at work, for if we could avoid the backlash of fate forever, we might never learn to improve our character, choose humility, and give the gods their due.

Accepting that whatever we are enduring, once we are past the point of choice, is “meant to be” is itself a step on the path of humility. It means that we are willing to accept our fate without resistance, but it does not mean that we need to continue on the path that led us to that fate. Humility is saving, even though we can’t map its chaotic effects directly to our experiences in the world; indeed, doing so would require an Olympian perspective, which we lack, immersed as we are in the daily events of life. To be willing to accept that whatever is happening was meant to be and could not now have been otherwise is no gesture of defeatism or passivity, but a recognition that events can be affected by us to a point but not forever, and that once we are past that point, our very willingness to accept them and move through them beautifully, gracefully, with dignity and without complaint, already sets our feet on the path that, followed diligently, leads us out of hardship and back into the gods’ favor.

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Wikipedia is written collaboratively by largely anonymous Internet volunteers who write without pay. Anyone with Internet access can write and make changes to Wikipedia articles…. Users can contribute anonymously, under a pseudonym, or with their real identity, if they choose. The Wikipedia community has developed many policies and guidelines to improve the encyclopedia, however, it is not a formal requirement to be familiar with them before contributing.

Thus the information provided as fact will prove in many cases to be what Socrates called “opinion” and distinguished from knowledge. The point is not that Wikipedia is not an interesting collaborative project, nor that one should never use it—but given the absence of credentials by its writers any accountability for accuracy, one who relies on it or cites its content without doing some serious homework to confirm that what’s presented as knowledge there is verifiable rather than mere “opinion” is on a fool’s errand.

Ebay is another example. Despite its “Safe Harbor” practices, feedback rating system, and community resources, people get burned every day buying and selling in the world’s largest online marketplace, where
as stated on their “About” page, “practically anyone can buy and sell practically anything.” Fraud and auction scams are inevitable, and the FBI reports that only an extremely small percentage of Internet crimes ever get solved. And while it is reasonable to expect that most of the individuals and businesses that trade on eBay do so without ulterior motive, it would be a great mistake to assume that a particular buyer or seller has the same good intentions. Staying clear of such a buyer or seller requires an awareness of the risks, some common sense in navigating around them, and the willingness to establish and enforce high standards for doing business, and to be willing to walk away from a “great deal” if it requires compromising those standards even a little.

There are more serious kinds of misinformation to be found on the digital Superhighway. The recent incident of a young man who was murdered after listing a family heirloom for sale on Craigslist by someone posing as a potential buyer certainly seems fantastic and exceptional. At the same time, it is well known that sexual predators lurk among the Internet’s chat rooms and social networks, and that it is not uncommon for those who use online dating services such as Match.com and eHarmony to present an enhanced profile that “emphasizes” what they believe to be their desirable qualities and plays down attributes about which they may feel less than confident. As a result, personal profiles may show a photo taken years earlier, or understate age or weight. And this is only the more obvious way that these sites mislead people. There also are the subtler deceptions of casting romantic attraction as a commodity, of promoting the idea that love can be arranged through an act of will based on 29-point surveys and so on. In presuming that love can be quantified, arranged through an act of will, and even “guaranteed,” dating services discard the profound truth that real and abiding attraction is fundamentally mysterious. As the saying has it, “marriages are made in heaven,” and whether or not two people get together well in this way is not something that can be determined by a survey. It is a matter of fate, subject to the approval of the gods. Anyone who has not understood that love always involves the workings of divine will has not understood love at all.

The potential consequences of ignoring or underestimating the dark side of the Web make a case for diligence that no thoughtful person will fail to take to heart. We have learned to exercise care in the use of electricity, fire, and other resources that have the power to work against us, and the Internet is no exception. Knowing that anyone can post anything, present opinion as though it were knowledge, or offer information that in understating or exaggerating, hides as much if not more than it reveals, we see clearly that diligence is an indispensable practice in using the Internet responsibly and securely. Children must rely on parental controls to ensure their safe travels along the Information Superhighway; the rest of us must rely on the inner voice of the daimon and the five points of fate practice, most notably diligence, which can protect us from the consequences of that particular form of hubris in which we believe something, not because we know it to be true, but because we want it to be.

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There’s a wonderful parable about an old Chinese farmer and his son, who lived on a small plot of land in a rural province and made do with little. One day, a wild horse came out of the mountains and began grazing on their land. At the time, horses possessed great value; only the wealthy could afford to own them, and according to local law, the wild horse now belonged to the them. Incredulous at their sudden good fortune, the son cried out in joy. “Isn’t it wonderful, father?” he asked. But the farmer said only, “We shall see.” The next day, the horse ran off, back to the mountains, and the boy was crestfallen. “Oh, father,” he said, “now we are poor again. Better that that horse had never come.” To this, the father replied, “We shall see.” On the third day, the horse returned with half a dozen horses following, and the son, once again, was dancing with delight, but when he went to his father to express his joy, the father said once again, “We shall see.” On the fourth day, the son climbed on one of the wild horses and was thrown badly, breaking his leg. While the father was tending to his son, the boy began bemoaning his bad luck, and the old farmer, comforting him, said, “We shall see. And on the fifth day, the province went to war, and the army recruiters came through the town and conscripted every eligible young man—except the one who could not go because he had a broken leg. And so on.

We do well to remember that even significant events are a chapter in the book of our life, not the whole story, and that given the quick-change artistry of the gods illustrated in the parable of the old farmer and his son, we cannot say that a certain development is a conclusion, only a turn in a road that continues. Who can say what good may follow some seeming misfortune? If we’re truthful, if we remain on the path of humility, all we can say is, “We shall see.”

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