Are you the captain of your fate, or a leaf blowing in the wind? How hard should you “try”? Is your fate determined upfront? Or is life exactly what you make of it?
My answers to those questions changed through the years but have now settled down, which means I am either correct or just stopped considering the issues of predestination, fate, and self-actualization. But I have found a comfort with a mental model I call “Life is a River”, a synthesis between the polar extremes of Fate and My Total Control.
Childhood years — Play and please
As a kid, I put in just about as little effort as I could, maximizing play time. If pressed, I’d do a chore, but didn’t volunteer. I made myself scarce not only to explore the wilderness, but to avoid being dragooned into cleaning the kitchen or vacuuming the floor. As time went on, I did more and more to please my parents, as a good child ought, but enjoyment of play and keeping the folks happy were as far as my life goals went.
Teen years — Responsibility, control, and blame
Sometime in my teens, I read a Dale Carnegie book, which espoused having a positive attitude, finding aspects of people to genuinely like, and setting life goals, then focusing on achieving them. This book clicked on a light on my head and gave me a roadmap for what I believed was success. This book was followed with a series of the “self help” books from the 70’s, emphasizing that life is what you make it, everything that comes into your life is caused by you, and taking responsibility for everything that happens. Click, click, click, my brain absorbed this new programming, rewrote its EPROMS, and ran with it. I was seduced not only by the feeling of power and control over a life that in youth had been mostly controlled by others, but by the manic thrills of imagining how great I could be.
The punishment for having this Total Control belief is that when something goes wrong, it is entirely Your Fault. Ah, but the depressive side of Mania takes these lashes happily, believing that any failure can be cured the next time by “trying harder and focusing more”. This mental model of how the world (or at least my destiny) worked served me well enough in my teens and early 20’s and I endured the emotional rollercoaster that came as a side-effect. At age 24, serious doubts began to creep in.
In 1981 and ’82, my dad and I built a fiberglass airplane in his garage. This plane, a “Quickie 2”, was promoted by flying magazines as a technical marvel, a revolutionary design that would change aviation. The only problem was, mine flew horribly, to the point of significant danger each time it went up. In my “take charge” mode, I felt that any lack in performance was due to my fault, as I must have built it wrong. My dad and I flew it from Southern California to an air show in Wisconsin, but barely made it, as it wouldn’t climb over 6500 feet elevation. En route, we had to overhaul the engine in Wichita Falls and got a close-up look at Deming, NM. The Experimental Aircraft Association and the plane’s designer assured me that inadequate flight performance was my fault. Then crashes of other Quicke 2s started happening. Person after person died or endured injuries as their Quickie 2 aircraft augured in. I ran the plane’s statistics through aeronautical design equations and found that it was underpowered, had wings that were too short, weird airfoils, and inadequate control mechanisms.
I made my final decision under the old “Fate is in my hands” rule and sold the plane. Good thing too, because the purchaser, a ex-Marine fighter pilot and dealer for the Quickie 2 company, crashed it and burnt up. My mental model was in ashes along with the plane. I was not in complete control of my destiny. Wishing and single-minded willpower would not change some realities. My mental model would have to change in order to function in the world this 24-year-old had just discovered.
20s and 30s Years — Accepting limits to personal power
I had friends who were fatalists, believing they were leafs blown in a windstorm. Their daily destiny was completely outside their control, according to their beliefs. I figured this was some kind of cop-out at the time, but now my guess is that they responded differently to the same perceived situation of feeling out-of-control as children that I did, except they threw away the reigns instead of gripping them tighter.
Dr. Laura Schlessinger says that the beginning of maturity is when we realize that There is a God and We Are Not Him. I realized this, although I did not know who that God was. My mental programming changed, to a “best effort and let go” model. I was still responsible for doing all I could but would now accept the limits of my power. This was a great improvement, as the sine waves of mania (all-powerful me) and depression (failure is all my fault) were damped by realism.
This mental model of life worked for me and better than any before. I pushed hard both mentally and physically and became a success. I planted over 200 rose bushes at my house (still driven!) but when one died I didn’t blame myself, I just planted another. I worked long hours and was a success in my career but drove my health into the ground because I had to always put out “my best”. The end of the line came one day when I was driving to work. The trip took 15 minutes and I had going the same route for 6 months. But on this day I drove for 2.5 hours and couldn’t figure out how to get to the office. I called my wife on the phone and explained this goofy situation and she told me to get on a plane home. I quit the job after the doctor checked my vitals and said: “Whatever you’re doing, stop it NOW!”. My mental programming had driven me into a corner.
40s and Beyond — Life is a River
My 30-40s mental map of life (“Best effort but limits to power”) failed to take into account some factors:
- If I’m not God, who is He? What does He want for Me?
- Why put out a Best Effort if I’m pointed in the wrong direction? Why drive fast to a red light?
- Am I generating so much noise I can’t hear midcourse corrections?
- What if part of my much-prized free will is in cooperating with a power smarter than me?
- What if my most important duty is to obey orders from above, instead of self-generated obligations?
I used my physical exhaustion to quiet my noisy motors and examine, listen, and discern the whispered voice of God. A vision came to me, remembering a rafting trip I took down the Colorado River in Eighth Grade. The river was powerful, long, yet calm. Once I placed my raft on it I was going to go where the river took me and had insufficient power to row upstream. Yes, I had free will and could paddle around inside the river, even get myself stuck in the mud on the banks. But if I cooperated with the current, it would take me to daily vistas of beauty and new experiences. This metaphor sank in and changed my understanding of the nature of fate, free will, and path of my life.
Inherent in the new mental model were several factors previously unconsidered or dismissed:
- The river was intelligent
- The river was too powerful for me to oppose
- The river had my best interests at heart
- Any adversity that came my way was not out of inconsiderateness by the river, but was intended for my growth by challenge
I felt a tremendous relief because of the loss of my illusion that, like Atlas, my world rested on my shoulders. Neither could I become complacent or lazy because my responsibility still existed to stay in the middle of the current and avoid rocks and obstacles. But the burden of attempting to direct the course of the river was now gone, as I accepted even more limits on my personal power. The physical breakdown had been yet another unrecognized gift from the river, showing me the folly of my imagined control over my life.
The “Life is a River” model serves me to this day, a great blessing.