Is Your Destiny Seeking You?

New Year’s Day feels like a time to reminisce about times past, to speculate about times to come, and to reflect and worry about one’s place along the journey. A concern that I perhaps share with others is that the pathway to future happiness may seem like a narrow one, so that my choices could so easily turn out to be incorrect, with catastrophic long-term consequences. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1841 essay “On Self-Reliance” offers a number of reflections on this theme, include modern-sounding admonitions to trust your own intuition and ideas, and to push back as needed against social pressures and expectations.

The essay is perhaps best-known today for Emerson’s aphorism: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” In other words, feeling an internal pressure to “be consistent” is another of those social pressures and expectations that should be critiqued and reconsidered. (Of course, being automatically opposed to social pressures and expectations would be another example of a “foolish consistency.” And making a change rather than giving in to “foolish consistency,” but then feeling compelled to stick to the change as new experience and evidence emerges, may only exchange one foolish consistency for another. I suspect that Emerson underestimates the difficulties of discerning, enunciating, and believing in one’s own intuition and ideas. Also, the possibility of “foolish consistency” does not rule out the possibility that a wise consistency may be a hallmark of great minds. This stuff isn’t easy.)

But on this re-reading of Emerson’s essay, I was struck by a comment that he attibutes to Caliph Ali: “Thy lot or portion of life is seeking after thee; therefore be at rest from seeking after it.”

The phrase appears as the saying numbered XV in a 1717 manuscript Sentences of Ali, Son-in-law of Mohamet, and his fourth successor, translated from an authentick Arabick manuscript in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, by Simon Ockley. Caliph Ali (c 600-661) was a cousin and son-in-law of Muhammad.

Imagine that looking for your true long-term happiness, for your destiny, is like searching for a needle in a haystack. If so, the task may seem impossible. But now imagine that you are rolling around the haystack, or perhaps more apropos, that the haystack is also rolling around you. You become much more likely to be pricked with that needle, whether you are carefully searching for it or not, especially if you remain sensitive to the presence of the needle. I know that I’m a lucky guy. But many of the deepest connections and joys in my personal and work life in large part seemed to come seeking after me, and my task was to notice when they pricked my attention. May you experience your destiny seeking you in the year to come.

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