01/10/2020
AMOR FATI ||
Love of fate. God I love the stoics. To embrace your own imminent death and be hyper aware of it, while also taking the reins of your own agency and will to live your life to the point of tears. It’s a beautiful balance.
When you embrace this balance, you don’t get to not care about your life, even though ‘all things fade and quickly turn to myth’ (incorporating / Aurelius). You care even more deeply, because this is your fate and your life and your love and it repeats on and on and on, as Nietzsche put it, as the eternal recurrence - despite death.
What the f**k does that even mean? I think: Every ending we endure, every suffering, every loss, every heartache, or every betrayal is:
1. good,
2. has always happened, and
3. serves a purpose, because we’re still alive.
It teaches us what to let go of. What to focus on that’s right in front of us in the present moment. And what to strive towards. It’s so easy to get caught up in attachment to the past, even when the present is begging you to release it with PROOF that it no longer serves you.
A comforting nugget from Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five that always helps me let go a little more epitomizes Nietzsche‘s eternal recurrence idea:
“The most important thing I learnt on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral.
All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just the way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.
When any Tralfamadorian sees a co**se, all he thinks is that the dead person is in a bad condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments.”
Every moment in our past is alive and well trapped in the amber of the moment like a bug. It is like our fate unfolded like the stretch of the Rockies. So rather than dwell on how you can get those peaks back, focus on the stretch of dirt or climb in front of you and see everything that happens to you as good because if you’re still alive then it’s part of your fate and you might as well live the f**k out of your life with love.
So it goes.
(You’ve made it this far? Grand you get a Fun Fact: the quote that adorned the front of my masters thesis was “so it goes” from slaughterhouse five. Why? It follows every mention of death in the book and after that thesis, I knew my career in research was dead, dusted, and done. Thank heavens, because look where I am now! ...writing for 10 people max on Facebook... 🙃)
