Love Your Fate (published in 2021)
Let me ask you a question, and be honest with yourself: how do you respond to life?
Do you find yourself generally welcoming of situations, whether they’re positive or negative? Or are you more the type to resist adverse circumstances and feel frustrated that things don’t go your way? Even more, do you complain?
While it’s certainly human nature to plan and hope for things to go our way, it’s universal nature for things to happen as they do, even if that doesn't agree with your personal view of what should happen. Think of how futile it would be for a single wave to go against the motions of the surrounding ocean (if waves could feel sensations, I’m pretty sure they’d feel burnt out extremely fast.) This is how you are when you resist your situations. You are a minuscule wave in an endless ocean. Why spend all your energy fighting circumstances instead of flowing with them?
The Stoics called preached this kind of attitude of life. Marcus Aurelius wrote that a fire continues to burn despite whatever is thrown into it. Epictetus said not to wish that anything be different, just that everything transpire the way that it does. Nearly 2,000 years later, Nietzsche would popularize this concept again in the form of “amor fati”- “love of one’s fate”. Just read this line from Nietzsche’s book Ecce Homo:
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