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.

The Garden of Forking Paths

A man stands alone on a pebble trail. Separate paths fork off in a spider web of directions; he stands in the centre of a crack in a windscreen. Around him, lush green lawns, trees sway in a gentle breeze. Thin, wispy clouds drift across a pale blue sky. Flowers in a rainbow of colours abound through this garden. The man stands on the path, a myriad of options surrounding him. He must take a step.

That man is me. I was going to put “was” instead of “is”, but I realise that my life is a constant garden of forking paths, or a circular room filled with doors, or however one wishes to visualise the choices one faces every day. Some choices are obvious, presented to us by others. Invitations, ultimatums. Some are hidden, choices we have to create for ourselves, choices we don’t even know we have to make until the light bulb flickers on.

Once upon a many Moon ago, I gave up prefacing my blog entries with apologies and explanations for my long periods of silence. But today, for the subject matter I’m dealing with, it’s kind of necessary to explain why I’ve been so quiet. You’re waiting for the punchline, right? The garden of forking paths?

Boom.

You’re right. It’s where I’ve been, it’s where I’m at, it is the chaotic flux my life has been in since the end of April. Gods. April. Four months gone.

Okay, so there’s a long story that I could go into, but...I don’t exactly want to air that laundry in public. To summarise it as succinctly as possible, there was this amazing, beautiful girl in my life. Things were going well. Really well. Then at the end of April, a week before my game-changing holiday in Seattle, it all fell apart. I messed things up between us and in spite of my best efforts, I can’t fix it. And it’s been weighing heavily on me and forms an intricate part of the paths I chose to walk down.

Now, Seattle. One of my dear friends, Kraken, used to live out there until she decided that, apparently, moving to Sweden to be with her husband was more important. So for three weeks in May, I went out there and finally experienced a city which I had been intrigued with since first watching Dark Angel oh so many, many Moons ago. It was the first time in twenty years I’d been back to America (family holiday to Florida in 1995) and it was, as mentioned before, a game-changer.

My trip to Seattle was the first time I’d taken longer than two weeks off work in the five years I worked at Boston Tea Party. It was the first time I’d actually gone out of the country, or on what one might consider a “proper holiday”, and the effect of that was...well, a curious mix of unexpected and expected. Perhaps...unexpected but anticipated? Put simply, three weeks away from work bled me dry of all the stress I had built up. Three weeks, in another country, so far away I couldn’t physically do anything about work, and all the worries, all the cares, they melted away. Something I heard happened on holidays but never truly experienced for myself.

Seattle was an amazing experience and a great place. My friend lived out on Bainbridge Island and the ferry ride across Puget Sound every day to get into Seattle was beautiful. I’m going to post some photographic evidence in a second, a day when me and Kraken were out and about, walking up...I want to say Second Avenue? One of the numbered avenues. I looked to my left, out over Pike Place Market and straight onto Puget Sound, glistening in the sunlight.

I grew up next to the sea. It was a long time, perhaps by the time I moved to Bath where my best water feature is a river, before I truly appreciated the beauty of the ocean. As much as I am happy living in Bath, I do miss being able to walk up to the cliffs and behold the awesome view. Looking out over Puget Sound, from Seattle or from the ferry from Bainbridge Island, stirred various emotions in that part of my brain. It was a beautiful sight to behold and one of Seattle’s major plus points.

There’s much more to say, on another day, about my trip to Seattle – about the day trip to Portland, Oregon, the tea shop behind Pike Place Market and various other things. Another day.

Three weeks in Seattle took so many weights off my mind, though one continued to hang around. But it was a weight I was prepared for, the weight I knew I would carry and still bear to this day. I won’t begrudge it, I won’t curse it. These are my feelings and for as long as the tiniest ember burns, I will embrace them.

Once I returned to Bath, returned to work, I realised something very quickly. Nothing in this place had changed. Sure, we’d managed to get shot of the most irritating New Zealander the gods have ever cursed this world with, but the stress was the same. The ass-hat* customers still vastly outweighed the delightful ones. The conversationalists, the ones with eyes you could lost in forever, the ones who were just generally cool.

(*use of the term “ass-hat” courtesy of listening to “I’m the One That’s Cool” by The Guild as I write this)

So there I was. I had walked a while along one path, a leisurely pace taking in Puget Sound, hidden nooks on Bainbridge Island and gargantuan bookstores, only to find myself, once again, in the eye of a rift, a fracture in the garden, paths spiralling off in all directions. The weights that had been lifted from my shoulders crashed down again and where once I had borne them without question, I now grew weary of their demands. Perhaps I was too consumed with my own woes, but I found the drive and determination I once had at work was gone. My ability to tolerate and remain patient with customers dwindled with each passing day. Finally, after having been back for a few weeks, I made the fateful decision.

I set out from the centre of this new branch of paths, the new forks in the road, and chose the one that led to my resignation from Boston Tea Party. And so five years of dedicated service came to an end. Not a bitter end. In fact, a coldly logical one. It was time. My experiences in Seattle, the change in myself and my feelings upon my return, rendered staying at Boston a terrible prospect. I would end up hating the place, resenting it. No. I like the place. I like the people that work there and I like that now, if walk in there, I can choose who I want to talk to. I can talk to my former regulars who I adore. I can ignore the frakwits who wound me up. I can ignore EVERYONE. If I so wish.

This path was not as...jaunty...as the path I walked in Seattle. This new path was terrifying. Full of unknown variables, a vast swarm of quantum possibilities waiting to be observed and realised. I had intended to find a “proper” job, sit behind a desk...ideally something related to my degree in Creative Writing. That was the idea. The reality...well, slightly more interesting.

My friend Oracle recommended a recruitment agency that had successfully found her a pretty nifty desk job. So I email the person Oracle suggested and started the ball rolling. I went along to their offices to officially sign up with them. Now some context. This agency also finds people a lot of temp work. Oracle said it would be worth mentioning that I’d be happy temping, given that it would be a miraculous turn of events if they could get me, a man with no office or publishing experience, a nifty desk job of my own quickly.

Instead, I stumbled into temp work at a warehouse. But not any old warehouse. No. A sex toy warehouse.

Ladies and menfolk, I have the honour and distinction of, for the moment, working for Lovehoney.

All right, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t daunted by the idea at first. I’m not a prude, I’m just...not overwhelmingly experienced and I really hope my parents and siblings have chosen NOT to read this entry. Even saying that publically makes me a little uncomfortable. Want to talk about it over a coffee? Sure, I’m happy to do that, in the physical public domain. Apparently writing it in a blog makes me squeamish. With this squeamishness in mind, you wouldn’t think I’d be massively comfortable at Lovehoney.

Are you kidding? I love my job! It’s fantastic! It’s easy! It’s stress free! IT’S CUSTOMER FREE! I run around the warehouse, I have a list of things to collect, I put them in a box and then place the box in a designated area for someone else to pack. Then rinse and repeat.

We’re reaching a point where I feel I should do some kind of wrap up/summation. This blog exists mainly thanks to my dear friend, Hammerhead. She stands as I once did, in the garden of forking paths, with many options laid out before her. I write this to relate my experiences, in the hopes that it offers some wisdom that I was not immediately able to provide on Facebook, where one status started us on this road. Where it spiralled out from there.

Here now, an attempt at wisdom. I spent five years in comfort and security, but I was never truly happy. There was always something gnawing at the back of my mind, something telling me this wasn’t my destiny. That’s a concept I’ve been thinking about a lot. Destiny. Whether certain factors could be interpreted as someone being my destiny, etc. It took me five years, one trip to Seattle and the Ace of Hearts before I realised it was time to take a running leap. To pick the path that lead into the dark, into the gnarled and twisted trees, the roaming fog, the howl of the wolf at the Moon. It’s a terrifying journey but I swear that it is one worth making. Sometimes the best things in life are those that terrify, confound, but most of all, the things that challenge you.

So my advice would be thus. If you stand at the centre of your own garden of forking paths, take the path that challenges you. Take the path that leads you into the fire, the fire that will forge you, temper your steel and make you stronger.