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Who are you? Who am I? | Week 35

September | Family and Career | Week 35 | 9/3/2023
What does family mean to you and how do you honor it? 

In the grand narrative of one's life, there are characters and context which one does not choose - where we're born, who our parents are, how many siblings we have, what languages we're taught, what information we're given, how we're treated or loved - a list so long it's impossible to delineate the varying degrees of impact for each. The exposition of one's life is granted to us not crafted by us. It's up for debate, how much of the proceeding narrative is out of our control due to the annals of ancestry, but we know undeniably that there is agency prerequisite for the rising actions, climax and falling actions of one's own narrative. The stoics have a famous aphorism, Amor Fati, lover of fate. We colloquially equate fate to the final destination of our life - the resolution - where we end up, our "eventual fate". But fate stipulates predeterminism and there is only one thing we know for sure is predetermined in life, the starting place, not the end. Who our family is, is our fate. Our birthplace is our fate. And given the ability to control the direction of the rest of our lives (albeit more or less for some), we are inherently actors in the final destination, but recipients of our starting place. As a "lover of fate", I choose to love my origin story, because what is the alternative? Ambivalence towards it? Resentment towards it? It's no question that those emotions are entirely justified for a great many people, perhaps even all of us. But the premisal problem with either of those alternatives is that whatever emotion we choose towards our fate sits at the base of our life, given fate is a matter of origin and not finale, and if anything other than gratitude resides at the base of our life, the trajectory of that life sits of rocky ground. 

Matthew 7:24 - 7:27: "Anyone who listens to my teaching and follows it is wise, like a person who builds a house on solid rock. Though the rain comes in torrents and the floodwaters rise and the winds beat against that house, it wont collapse, because it is built on bedrock. But anyone who hears my teaching and does not obey it is foolish, like a person who builds a house on sand. When the rains and floods come and the winds beat against that house, it will collapse with a mighty crash." This speaks to me as the same message: we all have a choice how to view our "fate" - our family, our origin, our beginnings - those who choose other than gratitude and love, despite having a plethora of reasons to do so, will live a life built on sand, and when the storms come, as they inevitably do, that life will collapse. The way I choose to honor the origins of my life's narrative is by choosing gratitude, by loving the better nature of the institution and by seeking it out in the individuals involved, each and every opportunity that life presents. 




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