DESTINY VERSUS FATE

A great analogy for me in understanding the critical difference between fate and destiny is the path of a mountain stream. Over the years and decades the stream erodes a channel down the mountainside, typically to an ocean. Rainwater and the mountain’s formation created the fated path of this stream. However, given how large the mountainside is, there are many other possible pathways for the stream. Knowing and making other pathways constitutes our ability to co-create our destinies with the mountain.

Each of us has a fate and a destiny. Fate is how we reference the original path made for us—that which was beyond our control, starting from and including conception. We cannot change our fate, nor are we responsible for having caused it. Fate must be acknowledged. For example, you may have been born into catastrophe like me, introduced to alcoholism, abuse, and neglect from birth. This is part of my fate. I had no control over who my parents were. But my innate gifts and who I was at birth are also my fate.

Those happenings in life over which we do have influence and are at least partially responsible for are aspects not of fate but of destiny. While we can’t move mountains, we have the superpower to alter and transform what is possible for us, to change the path of our lives. Destiny is what we do with our fate. Our individual and collective destiny must be actively discovered and fulfilled. Destiny can bring forth more of what fate has brought us, especially our gifts located in the aquifers of our inner self.

Destiny is our journey to becoming who we truly are; it’s evolutionary, having the capacity to move us forward. Destiny is co-creative. This dance with destiny impels us to listen to our inner knowing. Destiny involves making choices, and fulfilling it requires heroines. The red thread can guide us out the labyrinth to our destinies, as it helped Theseus to his. But we can too easily forget we have this thread, becoming lost or stuck or disoriented. We can take all that we were born with—the beautiful and catastrophic—to help make the world beautiful. We can realize our partnership with others and all of life by realizing the destiny inherent in our fates. How’s that for a paradox!?

To help others co-create their destinies, we must first claim our own. Also, like Theseus, we are motivated by intentions to help others, to alleviate the suffering of others. We see ourselves as heroines, as leaders, and we act accordingly.

A favorite passage of mine, which points to the suffering that can occur when we don’t work with our fate and open to our destinies is from The Gnostic Gospels:

"If you bring forth what is within you

what is within you will save you.

If you do not bring forth that which is within you What you do not bring forth will destroy you." —Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels

an excerpt from The Clue of the Red Thread: discovering fearlessness and compassion in uncertain times