The Choices We Make

Fate and Destiny

Deep in the Earth, sheltered in the roots of the World Tree, Yggdrasil, and near a wellspring known as Uröarbrunnr, three goddesses, the Norns, tend the World Tree, and as they sit among the roots, they weave the tapestry of fate for all the creatures of the Cosmos. They are Urd (Past), Veröandi (Present), and Skuld (Future), who command the fate of the living as they weave the tapestry of life and determine the moment of death as each thread is cut in its time. No other beings are as powerful or unpredictable.

The Three Norns

We are all concerned about our destiny and fate, and we wonder what life has in store for us. This Norse myth is no exception within Indo-European cultures. Other cultures may favor a single goddess or spirit, but the message remains the same. I appreciate the idea and the symbolism of the Norns. There is comfort in the idea of a common thread, testifying to the near-universal belief that we are all governed by destiny and fate, something we should not tamper with —a sense of inevitability that can pervade our lives. In Greek mythology, Zeus feared the “three sisters.” I wonder about that. Perhaps, as we age, we tend to reflect on our past and wonder if it could have been different, if our mistakes could have been avoided, why we are so fortunate, or why we have failed to do better. We examine the ledger of our lives, a reckoning.

The writer Jorge Luis Borges explores a metaphor of what we experience as we move from the past, through the present, to confront our future in “The Garden of Forking Paths.” This short story is part of a collection of previously published works titled “Ficciones” (Fictions, 1944), which, as a whole, explores the nature of fate and the distinction between reality and illusion. It is a distinction he pursued in many of his stories.¹

“Not in all,” he murmured with a smile. “Time is forever dividing itself toward innumerable futures, and in one of them, I am your enemy.” Jorge Luis Borges (1941), “The Garden of Forking Paths.”²

Much like the underlying idea presented in theories about self-organizing natural systems, the future we confront involves choices and selection among one or more options or potentialities. In The Garden of Forking Paths, choices are binary, either/or. Once chosen, there is only one path forward until another decision point arises. In natural systems, the options can be infinite, and the choices random. As we advance, no option, even if not chosen, is abandoned, and it will remain as a resource available in future selections. The path we take in life is more like that expressed in natural systems than the absolute either/or of The Garden of Forking Paths. We do, at times, get second chances, but no matter how much we may think we can control our future, our choices are often more random and subject to unforeseen circumstances than we believe. Time and circumstance confound us. The Arabic fable “Appointment in Samarra”³ speaks to this. This classic story of a man fearing death at one place, flees elsewhere, only to find death waiting for him there, illustrates the inevitability of fate, the futility of trying to escape one’s destiny, and the unpredictability of death. We are all familiar with stories like this that affect us, our families, and our friends, where, in an attempt to avoid one fate, we place ourselves at risk elsewhere. Is this the inevitability of our existence? Are we predestined to a fate we cannot prevent? Have we no choice, no free will, and what are the implications of this? Why are some successful and others abject failures? These questions plague us and leave us open to serious categorical errors, where a property is attributed to something that could not possibly have that property.⁴

I was raised in a family that attended the Presbyterian Church, which, like many of the Protestant religions, entertains the concept of the Elect, that God chooses those who are successful in this life and condemns those who are failures. Defined by the sociologist Thorstein Veblen as “The Protestant Ethic,” and described as a primary motivation driving capitalism and the accumulation of wealth, it is a prime example of a categorical error. Here, wealth alone is not an indication of being chosen by God. Neither is failure proof of damnation. It makes it all too easy to look down on others in smug self-satisfaction and ignore the injustice and the conditions of poverty and homelessness that plague our societies.

We live in a time when we believe that success in business and being wealthy are indications of genius, that such people are “innovators” and “entrepreneurs,” ignoring the fact that chance and circumstance are at work in their success. In the tapestry of life, their thread is as dependent on the warp and woof, the foundation and texture of other lives as ours is. Their success or failure, like ours, arises from the innate dependencies on others and the choices we make in determining the role we play as the texture and design of the fabric emerge over time. We are both the weaver and the woven tapestry, at times the highlight and at other times the supporting background.

Admonished as we are by Socrates’ famous aphorism that an unexamined life is not worth living,⁵ we all should look inward at ourselves from time to time. It can be humbling even to the most successful among us, and revealing of our dependencies on the contributions that others make, both knowingly and unknowingly. My reflections on some eighty-plus years lead me to appreciate how fortunate I have been, but it has not always been the best of all possible worlds. Unlike Candide,⁶ I do not see this as Dr. Pangloss would. Was this life of mine predestined, making me among the elect? I think not. Like most people, I have experienced setbacks, both great and small, as well as crises, both unforeseen and avoidable due to my poor judgment and carelessness; I have uncritically taken bad advice. In hindsight, I see that I have been a severe critic. To counter this, I have been fortunate to have been guided by family in the first instance and teachers and mentors who were uncompromising and wise. These are the warp of my section of life’s tapestry. If I think critically about this, I can see now that from my earliest days, I have been in the presence of individuals who had no fear of admitting they didn’t know the answer to everything. They became important because they were undogmatic in all things, and as a result, they were free in the most basic sense. I learned this from them as they guided me, giving me the confidence to learn from my mistakes, recover, and carry on. In time, my life thread became the warp in the tapestry of my children and the students I mentored.

Is this predestination or fate? I think not. As I reflect on this question, choice emerges as the dominant feature. We cannot choose family, but we can select the teachers and mentors who guide us on the way. Like everyone, they can be selfish or generous in what they teach us. I have favored those who were undogmatic, and they set me free by their example. Both my parents appear to be the products of similar choices in their lives, and while they were not chosen, their example was significant to me. Since my father had a previous marriage before meeting my mother, this might imply predestination, but I would not call it that. The element of choice prevails.

In The Fragility of Things, William Connolly explores the self-organizing ecologies that together constitute the world we inhabit. These interacting geological, biological, and climate systems are intrinsically creative, producing the complexities and stabilities that we experience and that have nurtured the emergence of the human species. Other human-originated self-organizing systems influence the Earth's systems. One of these is the economy, which presently prioritizes the self-organizing properties of economic markets and equates them with impersonal rationality; as a result, market outcomes become substitutes for human rationality and choice. This disrupts the inherent fragility of Earth's systems, failing to address the fragilities it exacerbates. This is a human-generated crisis, not a matter of fate or predestination. It is a matter of choice that we are ruled by market rationality. We live at a point where the path forward for humanity diverges.

As things have changed, some things remain the same. Human agency remains, and the individual choices we make are within our power as free beings. Yet we seem to have forgotten our role and have become untethered to our reality. Distracted by the bright, shiny objects of a seemingly infinite marketplace, we worship at the altar of a false god—wealth —and rely on the false promises of those to whom we grant the title of “genius.” We are far too willing to abdicate our freedom of choice to sycophants and strongmen, as well as oligarchs, who, like the Wizard of Oz, hide behind a green screen that determines our idea of reality and the real world.

This cannot be our fate. This is not the selvage (the final edge) of the human tapestry. It is not the best of all possible worlds. The world of reality is the world we choose and the dreams we have. It is not a world fueled by greed and defined by the destructive outcomes offered by the wealthy few who would destroy the Earth for their profit, all the time, promising our final chance to escape to a future “paradise” of endless red sand beaches on Mars.

We are not destined for that.

1. For a deeper look at Borges’ pursuit of the nature of reality, see The Rigor of Angels, William Egginton (2023). Pantheon Books.

2. Selected Fictions, Jorge Luis Borges. Translated by Andrew Hurley (1999). Penguin Books

3. The fable is about a servant in Baghdad who encounters Death, who reveals he has an appointment with the servant later that night in Samarra. The servant, believing he is threatened in Baghdad, flees to Samarra, thinking he can escape fate, only to encounter Death. If only he had stayed in Baghdad. The Story was retold by W. Somerset Maugham in 1931 and later adapted into a novel by John O’Hara in 1934, about a self-destructive car dealer.

4. A semantic or ontological error.

5. Supposedly said by Socrates at his trial for impiety and corrupting youth. In Apology: Five Dialogues, Plato. Translation by G.M. Grubes, revised by John Cooper (2002). Hackett Publishing.

6. Candide, Voltaire (2019). Independent. Candide’s companion, Dr. Pangloss, is famous for his expression that “It is the best of all possible worlds, regardless of the tragedy.