Fate, Love, and You Can't Always Get What You Want (or in my case- ever)

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately. About fate and free will and destiny. I suppose I always think about these things, and lately I feel I’ve been challenged a bit, but something finally clicked and this is what I figured out.

We are like trees. To grow and rise up is our destiny. Within that destiny we have many possible fates. Some fates we are more destined for (and we will consistently be called and compelled towards) but there are many possible end fates. Looking at a tree, there are many different branches, some are low, some are high, some are fruitful and blossom, some are bare. Some are sturdy and strong, others are weird and weak. All of the branches of the tree stem from the same trunk. We have many possibilities.

So imagine you are a squirrel. You start off at the base of this tree. You climb straight up the trunk, and then you hit a crossroads where the branches split. Looking up, you see both paths and that there is an abundance of leaves and flowers and fruit up above, and you are excited and hungry and full of energy, so you make a choice and travel up that branch. And those splits happen as you travel up the branch and everything you are doing is all part of your fate. It is all as it should be and always should be. Everything is right.  

But sometimes you start to go off on a branch (by free will and freedom of choice) that seemed great and then- WHOAH! Someone came around with a chainsaw and cut the rest of the branch off- and you can no longer follow that branch (path) because that opportunity no longer exists (Fate is intercepting your destiny).

So you keep going on, doing as you do, everything is as it always should be. But you cannot climb backwards, although sometimes while climbing, you lose your footing and slip, and end up catching yourself having fallen onto a different branch, one you had never explored previously.

Or sometimes you reach the end of a shorter branch, and as a squirrel you can climb and jump and sail through the air, so you can jump over to another branch and climb higher, skipping over a part of the branch you would have had to climb up, had you chosen that branch initially. You cannot sail across the tree, but you always have options I suppose to jump to a nearby branch. Sometimes you are so high up or far out on a branch that you cannot jump anywhere and are stuck on your branch.

I guess my point is that sometimes we hit the end of the branch and we are all the way out, or all the way up. Do we see if there are leaves and flowers and fruits at the end of our branches? Or at the end of other branches that are closely connected? Maybe we might hope, but who is to say that every blossom will indeed become a bloom for fruit? There are no guarantees in life.

This is why it is essential to life and to enjoy the now. Enjoy the view of the forest from the branch where you sit upon, don’t yearn to see it from the top of the tree, you can’t climb back down to relinquish a previous view once you have already moved on.

I suppose my contemplation came to fruition when I began to think of how I was previously. How much I plotted and planned and set those gears into place. Of course I accomplished things; indeed, I am a productive woman, but no matter what I did: I didn’t get what I wanted. Which is kind of silly, because I wasn’t wanting things that were unrealistic or unlikely, I thought I had plotted a stable steady path that was infallible. I didn’t get the career I initially chose, or the family, or the life, or the lover/husband or a lot of things. I don’t mean to sound ungrateful, I’m very happy for what I have, I am very blessed. Everything is perfect as it is. But I didn’t get what I planned for, what I attempted to get, what I wanted. Everything in my life is as it should be, but it doesn’t make sense that EVERY SINGLE THING I planned for or really really wanted hasn’t worked out. Everything.

It is like I keep following a recipe and it isn’t turning out how it was supposed to. What I am cooking seems like the right recipe, I’m using all the same ingredients, but I’m getting a drastically different result than what I had planned for. And it is ultimately better, because it is exactly what I need. I just didn’t know it when I started cooking.

I have been dealt disappointment. I don’t get the men I fall in love with, drastically so. My heart has broken and fallen and been stomped upon. Time and time again.  The serious relationships I have given every ounce of effort into have ultimately failed, but not by my doing. The life I built was destroyed and crumbled. The careers I chose weren’t for the taking when the timing was right. But I keep traveling on and doing as I should be doing, in a way passing by branches that were in my sight when I was lower on in the tree. And the higher up I get, that I have passed by those opportunities (or rather that they have passed by me…) the more I see that this is a very tall tree filled with much more to come, I just do not know what.

But it is all good. I have learned very important life lessons. I have learned patience. Forgiveness. To live without expectation. Love.

I have discovered happiness. On my own. Facilitated by only the loving Universe I am within. I have discovered love.

 I am struggling lately, on and off it seems, with the total lack of control I have within my life. I have no idea what is to come, what will be, what to expect, what I will achieve. I dream, oh how I dream, but I never set my heart on intangible things. I am happy within my reality. I have built up so many things, but ultimately, regardless of plans, my life will go whichever way it is supposed to. All that changes is my reactions to it, how hard I am willing to work to continue to propel myself forward (as to not become stagnant) and how much I just ‘go with the flow’ that is life.

I never get what I want. And that’s okay, because I’m getting everything I need instead. But sometimes, just sometimes, whether it be fate or free will or whatever have you, it's like that Smith's song: "For once in my life, let me, get what I want; Lord knows it would be the first time"

But then again, all you need is love.