A short excerpt from an essay on the idea of destiny that will be included in a new collection of non-fiction essays to be published in the coming months.

DESTINY’S PROMISE
By John Herlihy


I have a fascination – passion might be a better word – for exploring the true meaning of certain words. We use a multitude of words every day of our lives to describe our deepest hopes, desires and sympathies, words that trip off the tongue with ease, but whose actual significance find themselves locked within the closed door of the mind or lost within the dreamy mist of the heart; words whose true meaning escapes us, although they are as simple as pocket change for penny candy and as profound as tokens of wisdom that we call upon when in need. Their true significance lies locked within us, remote and unattainable, never to be cracked open to see the light of day as enlightening revelations for inquiring souls. When they are uttered and given life through sound, they become only imperfect words that have no right to linger; they are enough to make your tongue thick. Words are there for the asking; but not always up to the job to full satisfaction. I am thinking of words such as faith, love, heart, soul, intelligence and intuition, not to forget destiny, the focus of this article. What do they really mean to our modern sensibilities? Are words like grumpy bears sleeping away their usefulness during the winter hibernation of our time? Or are they the treasured nuts that squirrels bury in autumn to serve their needs later in the season of scarcity?

The beauty of words lies in their creative sounding through the rhythms and pitch of the vocal organs, their sweet utterance on the lips, their random scribbling that becomes artistic forms of calligraphy through the handcraft of writing, not to forget their ability to sculpt the sharp edges of the mind into shavings of thought that ultimately dissipate into the wind with a hush and a sigh. Words pluck the lute of our imagination with their resonance and give voice to our inmost thoughts and desires, making them audible as a means of communication, if not fully realized within the mind and heart as forces of higher awareness and perception. They are drawn up from our inner depths as the expressed reality of our conscious dreams. They give voice to the silence around us, then drift away like feathers floating silently through air, until they die alone and are gone, leaving silence behind as though they never existed. Their effects on the mind remain for a while and speak to us, like shoe tracks in snow. They are “the dancing footprints of the fox on icy Walden pond” that Thoreau wrote about, preserving messages to a tracker until the snow melts their trace away into nothingness.

Universal terms like “faith” and “love” get short shrift in today’s modern world as dreamy concepts that are hard to visualize for the mature sophisticate of today; they have lost the luster of their divine quality as talismans of a higher reality. Children preserve their belief in fairies and elves in the same way that they extend instinctive trust to the undeserving, and in doing so they give themselves away before they realize what they have lost. In adulthood, however, we give nothing away as expressions of easy currency. The profession of faith in God as the Supreme Being proclaims a personal naiveté in the opinion of many people today who are thoroughly steeped in the worldview of modern science, while expressions of love evoke passionate self interest. The word “wisdom” means the ability to earn money on the stock market; but the word “destiny” crawls up over the horizon of our lives like a black cat on silent paws. It sends shivers down our spine, rings like a shrill klaxon of predetermination and fixity, and infringes upon our sense of personal freedom like a thief in the night about to steal our most valuable possession, namely our illusion of liberty and our personal, inalienable right to self-determination. We cannot blame the words themselves for abandoning us and giving up their ghost, any more than we can blame the notion of destiny for robbing us of our personal initiative and liberty.

Words are merely approximations the mind uses to communicate abstract thoughts through symbolic letters and mantric sounds; they flutter and fly like sparrows on the wing, tiny and insubstantial. The word “destiny”, however, symbolizes a fearful fact, incontrovertible and real, never to be undone or returned to the silence of the unlived life. It fills the continuum of time with its factual presence, unchangeable and firm, until the individual destiny ends up like an expended balloon, slipping away breath by breath. For a while, you wear your destiny like a suit of clothes even if you are not sure it fits right. You put it on and call for adjustments, but there is no tailor who can shorten the cuff or loosen the waistline of your life’s trajectory through an appointed time. You must wear it whatever the circumstances of texture and cut of cloth until it fits like a kit glove. “All of life is a foreign country,” Jack Kerouac wrote in a letter to a friend in 1949, suggesting just how difficult living life can be within the fixed frame of our destiny. If life is a foreign country and we are only strangers in a strange land, then destiny may ground us in the reality of this world and bring familiarity of circumstances to our lives. Only later do we realize that destiny means much more than the flutter of wings or the tread of a rolling stone.

The forces of destiny begin to manifest themselves in the life of an individual from day one. Destiny lies embedded within the fingerprint, footprint, mindprint , and even the concept of a soulprint bestowed upon a person at birth as a personal imprimatur that identifies each soul as singular and unique by virtue of the path of individual destiny. Destiny lies in the sunrise of life. It is an ancient form of knowing that lies in beginnings. Destiny can be found in the sunset of life. It is an ancient form of purpose that lies in endings such as twilight and darkness that wraps us in the cloak of night whose inner lining contains the promise of a new day. “Destiny is with God” (3:38; 5:18), the Quran reminds those who read its verses, or it lies “with the hell-fire“ (4:97; 14:30). It begins and ends on the pivot of God who is the one truth and the final resting place. If time is old by virtue of its longevity, then eternity is new and forever fresh. The path from beginning to end that we call destiny represents old time within a young eternity, a senile and degenerate presence unhinged from the innocent timelessness of forever.

In today’s modern, sophisticated world, with its emerging technologies and a seemingly endless variety of electronic gadgets intended to unite people together into the lulling perspective of a pseudo common good, we like to think that we are the masters of our own destiny. We seek freedoms as though they were there for the taking, freedoms that will set us loose from ourselves and our inherent limitations. We strive to gain control over the natural order through modern science. We seek to unravel the mysteries of DNA with the hope of unlocking the mysteries of intelligent design. On the physical plane, we make efforts to perfect our bodies through sound nutrition and regular exercise; indeed, many people today have had great success in improving the quality of their lives and prolonging the life cycle through these forward-thinking disciplines. We have a multitude of choices that people of former times never dreamed about. We climb the ladder of life, pursue interesting and profitable careers, travel the globe in comfort and enjoy a life style and a level of consumerism that we now take for granted as the privilege of a well rounded life.

The concept of destiny, however, eludes our full understanding. After all, in some curious way, we are not fully ourselves in light of our given (human) nature and we do not fully appreciate the context of mystery that the mystifying universe presents us with. As a result, we suffer doubts that are beyond our control and we do not enjoy the kind of certainty that we feel to be rightfully ours. Instead, we feel like the moon, full of craters and scars made from the onslaught of life’s incoming space debris. We are full of borrowed light and reflect only that which we are able to glean from the luminescence of the sun. We have no light of our own. Traditional concepts found in all the major world religions illustrate a life wrapped in the light of a unique destiny, written on an eternal tablet that ultimately finds its fullest expression in its unfolding within the earthly sphere. Our destiny is thrown down to us like an unraveling scroll by the guiding Hand of the Divinity.