Destiny is not what it seems

Destiny is something that has been plaguing my mind as of late. To my mind, many (what some may define as) incidental details I have noticed are linked to the one destiny I concern myself with. My romantic destiny. In truth, that is when I break out all of my philosophical arsenal, rarely any other time. I don’t worry about my destiny as a writer. For one thing, I am writer. Published or not, the fact that I am a writer exists. It has existed since I was fifteen, when I figured it all out and when I read in an interview with Matthew Reilly in the back of his book Area 7 – when asked what advice he had for aspiring writers – “Yes. There is no such thing as an aspiring writer. You are a writer. Period.”

No, it’s my romantic destiny that I spend restless nights concerning myself with. It’s the reason I sometimes have a Cylon running around my head, a manifestation of my subconscious, or at least the other, quieter part of my psyche, trying to help me reason out why this fire just won’t die.

I have a great reservoir of metaphors at my disposal, comprising a large part of my philosophical arsenal. I have this whole...elemental theory, if you will. It’s partly based in astrology, how the twelve signs of the zodiac each have a corresponding element. A few years back I spent a lot of time considering these elements and how certain people in my life embodied these elements. For my part, I am water. I am patient. I wash up and down, wear down a single rock over thousands of years if need be. But equally I can be relentless, reckless, tides stirred by external and internal forces. A force to be reckoned with. Water always finds a way. No matter the diversions, it will always find its way, follow its true course to the sea.

That’s one metaphor. A pretty good one, I think. Only it gets tricky in certain contexts, especially when I talk about feelings. So this is where my metaphors get a bit mixed. In comes fire. Fire is great for romance. Heat, passion. It’s fabulous and fitting. Love is akin to air, breathing life into the fire. Take away the oxygen, it starves. The flames subside, they die, burnt-out ashes, wisps of smoke drifting away. Now you would think that someone completely not replying to any of your messages would constitute starvation of the fire. In most circumstances you would be absolutely right. In most real, obeying-the-physical-laws-of-nature situations. When it comes to things as nebulous and existential as feelings...things get a bit trickier.

In case anyone hasn’t noticed, I have someone on my mind. I mentioned her abstractly last time and will continue to talk about her abstractly out of respect for her life and privacy. There are those readers who will know who she is, my friends who I have spoken to at length on the topic because I can’t shake her out of my head. There are few who have met her, though.

I’m also determined to talk about the situation itself in an abstract fashion. Suffice it to say, I made a lot of mistakes and I’m paying the price for them. The icy suffocation of silence is something I brought upon myself. I may never know nor understand her reasons, but she has them and I respect them. I know many of my friends will disagree very loudly with me, but this is my belief – I am at fault and she has every good reason, even if they only make sense to her, to be this cold towards me. As Benedick said in Much Ado About Nothing, “It is the opinion fire cannot melt out of me.” I screwed it up. If there is a villain to this piece, it is I, no matter how unwitting or repentant I am.

ANYWAY.

Destiny. So, in the abstract, I have tried to paint a scene of hopeless desolation. I am walking alone in a desert, calling out her name, with no response. No water to sustain me, only the fires of the sun searing my skin down to the bone. One could hardly regard her as my destiny. In the incredibly, infinitesimally unlikely event that she should be reading this, it is no doubt killing that idea even further. Yet I cannot shake it.

This is where things get very awkwardly existential. It engenders a question. Am I merely seeing these incidental details as signs of a destiny because I cannot let my feelings lie, or are they truly emblematic of some grander scheme the ’Verse has in store for me? I have been contemplating what it all means for some time now. Doubtless I will continue to ponder these conundrums for days, possibly weeks to come. But now, thanks to the front cover of Battlestar Galactica season four*, I have a mantra.

Destiny is not what it seems.

Recently I have sworn to take some much needed “Me” time. My heart, for reasons that I can only surmise are its own, separate entirely from my conscious thoughts, is set on someone who is lost to me. A persistent ghost. So these incidental details, if they are pointing to this person being my destiny (a fact that diminishes every time I say it, even more so saying it here on my blog) fall nicely into my plan. As it stands, I have no chance with this person. Thus by retaining my feelings for her without taking action as there are no more actions to take, I am free to organise the other aspects of my life. Most importantly my writing. I am aware there are many people who will violently shake their heads at what they see as a self-destructive path. The thing is...to quote Loki, “Once you accept that, in your heart, you will know peace.” He’s talking about accepting freedom as life’s great lie, a topic we can debate some other time. I’m talking about accepting your feelings. Even if they’re futile. Own them. Embrace them. Here we come back to Shakespeare, but Polonius and Hamlet – “And this above all, to thine own self be true.” Retaining feelings for someone who does not requite them can be incredibly destructive, yes, if you refuse to acknowledge and accept that you cannot change their minds. In my case, it came from reaching out, from exhausting all reasonable options. In doing so, in reaching out and being met with silence, I accepted I had lost her, I had lost her affection. I cannot change my heart’s desires. It’s a fickle thing, but it has to do it by itself. I cannot trick my heart into forgetting. It’ll do it all by itself, in its own time, when it’s ready.

In case nobody’s guessed it, I am a determinist. A determinist with a twist though. The twist is what I talked about last week. The garden of forking paths. Destiny, fate, whichever name you choose to bestow upon it, is not a single linear progression. It’s a web, a spiralling, chaotic web, intermingling, intertwining with all the other webs in the ’Verse. I subscribe to the idea that many, many paths in our lives are written out before us. When we choose to walk down a certain path in the garden, it follows that narrative and the others fall away, possible futures that never happened. Unless you subscribe to the Multiverse Theory. But nonetheless, our paths, our fates, are determined by our choices. Many endings have been written. It is how we navigate the enduring adventure of life that determines upon which chapter our story ends.

Ultimately, there’s one thought that keeps me sane in all of this, keeps me from trying to take action in a situation where all reasonable avenues have been pursued. No matter what, destiny is utterly unstoppable. If this woman is my destiny, there isn’t a damn thing I can do to stop it. It might be ten days, ten weeks, ten months, ten years, but destiny is like water. It’s patient. It can wait. And if this woman isn’t my destiny, if someone else is my romantic destiny, well frak, can’t do anything about that either. Even if I have sworn that I will not be worrying about affairs of the heart for a good long time.

*It is further fitting that this blog post, my seventy-fifth of this blog, was inspired by Battlestar Galactica, the eponymous star of the show bearing the hull code BS-75. Destiny at play once again.

Sometimes you have to roll a D20

I would not describe myself as a confident person. Over the past seven years I have grown out of my shell, shed the nervousness, the shyness, but I wouldn’t say I have an abundance of confidence. Still I am capable of moments of shyness, moments where I want to throw my hood up and hide from the worlds around me. But to outside observers, I appear to be possessed of some compelling form of confidence. Though I would personally define it as a kind of foolhardy madness, it gives some appearance of confidence. Allegedly.

Today I leave it to you, dear readers, to judge whether it is confidence or madness. I have been inspired to write this by two things: 1) Recent actions that have been defined as confidence and 2) A friend’s Facebook post.

As many of my single compatriots are acutely aware, the Socially Appointed Day of Obligatory Romantic Appreciation of Partners and of Singlehood Awareness approaches. Or in the common vernacular, Valentine’s Day. Closer to the day, I wish to delve into the concept a little more, so I’m going to gloss over my own Valentine’s Day context for now. Right this moment I am going to jump over point one to point two. It makes sense in terms of narrative flow, trust me.

I witnessed a Facebook post by my friend Mako, highlighting that a lot of her friends are bemoaning the approach of Valentine’s Day. Railing against the social custom because of how much it emphasises that they’re single. Mako then makes an interesting point. Even though it has become an inherently commercialised “Hallmark holiday” as she puts it, it is also a day for single people to seize the moment. A day where they can shed the usual cares and worries of social protocol as this day has been Socially Appointed as a day where not only couples show affection, but singletons can express theirs to those they wish to shower with affection. As Mako says “seize a moment without fear; and get a cheesy card while you’re at it”.

This abstractly brings me to the events of Sunday, February 1st, 2015. Thirteen days before the appointed moment, I nonetheless, for all intents and appearances, decided to seize it anyway.

Okay, I’ve talked about my train wreck of a love life in some abstract terms before and there’s a part of my brain wigging out a little that I’m about to post this, because it’s revealing a genuine moment in my life. And, by extension, a moment in someone else’s life. So a lot of details are going to be very deliberately obscured.

On Sunday, I encountered a girl I have previously met. Someone that I have chatted to on occasion, someone I have found very attractive since the moment I first met her, but I don’t know very well. And on this particular Day of the Sun, I decided that I should seize the opportunity, the moment, as we do not oft cross paths. I wanted to rectify that, as well as the part about not knowing much about her. Two key philosophies helped me to do this.

First, Shakespeare. My favourite quotation from his works – Polonius, Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 3. “This above all: to thine own self be true.” I entered into some debate with myself over whether to ask this girl out. I kept trying to talk myself out of it, reasoning that it would be madness, something so out of the blue from someone she barely knows. But I couldn’t shake the words. I couldn’t shake the sure and certain feeling that I really, really wanted to do it, otherwise I wouldn’t be trying to talk myself out of it so vehemently.

Second, a Chinese proverb. “He who asks is a fool for five minutes. He who does not ask remains a fool forever.” I would later quote this to the girl in question and she agreed with the wisdom of it. I knew that not asking her, that letting the moment pass, would make me feel even more of a fool than asking.

This story, alas, ends with me feeling a bit of a fool. For reasons I shall not detail, she declined (in a very nice, let-down-easily way) to go out for a drink with me. We parted on what I believe and hope to good terms and I very much hope to see her again.

The point I’ve been making and driving at all this time, the reason for the choice of title is, well...in the title. Sometimes you have to a take a chance. You have to roll that D20, praying for the natural twenty, the critical success that leads to bliss and happiness (or glory and riches, depends what you’re rolling for). But you can’t ever get that critical success unless you roll and take the chance. Whether you take that appointed day, February 14th, or any day before or after. Change your stars. Roll a D20.