Thursday 25 January 2007

The substance of your fate.


H.G. Wells wrote:

"What personalities you will encounter in life, and have for a chief interest in life, is nearly as much a matter of chance as the drift of a grain of pollen in the pine forest.

In other school rooms and nurseries, in slum living rooms, perhaps, or workhouse wards or palaces, round the other side of the Earth, in Canada or Russia or China, other little creatures are trying their small limbs, clutching at things about them with infantile hands, who some day will come into your life with a power and magic monstrous and irrational and irresistible. They will break the limits of your concentrating self, call you out to the service of beauty and the service of race, sound you to your highest and your lowest, give you your chance to be godlike or ignoble.

These unknowns are the substance of your fate. You will love them, hate them, serve them, struggle with them, and in that interaction the vital force in you and the substance of your days will be spent.

And who they may be, and their peculiar quality and effect, is haphazard, utterly beyond designing."

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11 comments:

  1. And knowley came upon a curates egg and he tasted it and it was good.

    Just coming into contact with all these wonderfully diverse peoples in blogsphere has had an effect on my life. Cheers Lee

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  2. H.G.Wells has the capacity to send shivers down my spine. Just consider this quote:
    " The past is but the beginning of a beginning, and all that is and all that has been is but the twighlight of the dawn.
    A day will come when beings who are now latent in our thoughts and hidden in our loins shall stand upon this earth as one stands upon a footstall and shall laugh and reach out their hands amid the stars"

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  3. Wonderfully written and insightful.

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  4. This is all very real for me right now. It's good to hear your feelings put into words. Sometimes at least.

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  5. Makes fate sound pretty chancey...

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  6. Do you believe in fate Lee? I think chance plays a part in our lives but we drive the direction... we choose the path.

    For example, I met a man in the airport a few months ago, began a conversation and now am working on a great marketing project with him. He told me he thought things happen for a reason.. that it was our fate to meet... I dont buy that. I think I made that connection happen. I was in the mood to converse... I was high off a great weekend in NYC with my friends and had the world as my oyster. I wowed him... I did that not chance or fate. There were other people I could have chatted up there... but I could see that he was someone to know.. I could tell by watching him eat his hamburger! lol

    I think we create our own destiny based on being ready willing and able to see it in front of us.

    When the pupil is ready the teacher will appear kind of thing... just my humble opinion!

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  7. this piece sounds like it's about having kids. quite a few lines of this resonated in me.

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  8. Kate: I don't believe in fate from the point of view of predestination. I believe in fate from the point of view of meeting people, or having things happen, that you could not in your wildest dreams have predicted.

    What I would do when I meet you, say, is determined by how we interact with each other. But you being who you are and me being who I am, and our meeting, are all totally random and unpredictable events.

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  9. I think of this each time I fly on a plane and I look around me at the people in the airport. It amazes me, we talk, we laugh, we go our separate ways, most assuredly to never meet again, yet each person we encounter has an impact on our life.

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  10. ...so we work with what we get.

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