Amor Fati

Nature magically suits a man to his fortunes, by making them the fruit of his character.--Emerson

Frank Hebert

Amor Fati

On the line between fate and coincidence,

Picture the tightrope. 

Now, picture the walker.

Dress her up in a tutu. No, tight skirt and high heels.

Call her Fortune and hold your breath for her. 

Sling her high over could be and never can.

Toss no coin, no I Ching,

Put your palm away.

Throw  foregone conclusions to the wind for her.

If you love her, don't whisper a prayer.

I consulted a fortune teller long ago. It was 1975 and I'd had a miserable two years...so much so that, at the ripe old age of twenty-seven, I was sure I'd already blown my whole life. We'll call the fortune teller MS and let's just forget our preconceived notions for her; she wore a suit, had a tidy, well-lit, one-woman office with the first dot matrix printer I ever saw. She was the talk of the over-educated and aging youth of tired and tripped-out Chapel Hill at the end of the Age of Aquarius. The waitresses at the health food restaurant on Franklin St. looked bored with their miso and brown rice. We were all wondering, what would we become now that we'd been the center of the universe?

MS didn't act mysterious. She acted more like a personnel director interviewing me for a job...cool, a little impersonal, like she didn't much care if I got the job or not, which somehow cut more ice with me than if she'd worn a turban and hunched over a crystal ball. This was more like science than seance, I told myself. I had an appointment, a time-slot. I can't recall much except that I felt intimidated. At the end, my personal future was handed to me, unreadably dot-matrixed onto perforated-edged paper. Single spaced.

Here's all I remember: There will never be children in your life and you have a guardian angel named David who will always watch out for you. There was a whole lot more, but these were bad news, so they stuck with me. I wanted to have children and I absolutely refused to let anyone named David angel me.

In fact, she lost me right there with the whole guardian thing. There were a slew of them listed, with job descriptions and a pecking order; you'd think, with that many angels, a person could manage to put some children in her life if she wanted to. Those worthless guardians may have taken up most of the three pages of my whole future. Who needed a fancy, cutting edge printer and a white-carpeted office for that? And yet, I was afraid to scoff, even silently to myself; that's how protected a girl could be growing up in the South back then.  I felt even more fragile and sorry for myself when I left than I did going in, but, if she happened to be right--and she had as good a chance as anybody--I figured fate was fate and I'd better bow to it gracefully. Throw out the guardian angels and she'd confirmed my worst fears; I was sunk, finis, and I'd never even really left home yet. And a gaggle of guardian angels were going to see to it that nothing exciting ever happened. 

If she'd actually been able to tell the future, here's what she would have printed out for me:

You'll marry a fighter pilot. You'll be engaged in Las Vegas. You'll live in a dump in Korea and on a river in Alaska. And in the Arizona desert, and near the salt ponds of Tidewater, Virginia, and in the armpit of Alabama. You'll have two blonde, blue-eyed children with merry spirits. You'll be a dancer and an athlete. And a shrink. You'll be rich for one year. Just one. But you'll worry about money that year, too. On your sixty-third birthday, you'll remember me and marvel at how you'd given up hope. And at how you could have been young enough and dumb enough to ask me in the first place. Your whole life, you'll think guardian angels are bologna.

Sometimes our fate resembles a fruit tree in winter. --Goethe