Fate is the Hunter
Fate & Luck in our Lives
Recently I was at our cottage in Quebec snowshoeing with a friend on the lake. The lake had frozen over weeks before and my friend has cut through the ice to get water for his cottage and found that there were two layers of ice with slush in-between them. My friend suggested that we cut across a bay as a shortcut as he has tested the ice only a 200m earlier and found that this region of the lake also had two layers of ice with slush between so that – even though the temperature was now well above zero – it “should be’ safe. I started walking away from near the shore for our shortcut and suddenly one of my snowshoes falls through the top layer of ice. I was almost stuck and think it very strange that my snowshoe did not stop at the second layer of ice. With difficulty I extract my snowshoe and test the hole with my ski pole. There is no second layer of ice. If the hole was larger I would have fallen right into the frigid waters with snowshoes which would have made it very, very difficult to get out of the lake. The fates were, once again, teaching me a lesson: there is not safety except to be careful and never, never take shortcuts. Luck was on my side that day and I am here to tell the tale. Was it skill or knowledge that saved me? No. It was Fate.
When I was a young boy I had a friend named John who favourite saying was: “Why work hard when instead you can be lucky!” At the time I thought that an absurd statement. Now I am not so sure. Yes, I work hard when needed, but I have seen people who are relatively lazy do VERY well in life and the very hard workers, who often don’t have great social graces, not be as successful as they desire or deserve. Of course there are many possible reasons for this but today I want to only explore the role of Fate, or luck, on our lives.
Fate & luck play an essential, unacknowledged role in our lives according to both the author Ernest Gann pictured above and the religions of the Ancient world. The randomness of life shows us that we not totally in control of our lives. Luck reminds us that we are not mini-gods and that the desire to be all knowing and all powerful is a pathology that only results in death. This point is made eloquently in the book I am reading called Fate is the Hunter by Ernest Gann. Gann brings you right into the cockpit, recounting both the triumphs and terrors of pilots who flew when flying was anything but routine. Through his personal stories he makes his one point clear, again and again and again: One pilot does everything right and lives while another pilot, equally capable, crashes and dies. In one of his tales he is flying to Rio de Janeiro from Bolivia with a very, very bad map and are close to running out of fuel. They finally come to a river which is important because the town with the airport they are flying to in the middle of the Amazon jungle is on a river. They have to choose to either turn north or south on the river. If they make they wrong choice they will run of fuel, crash and die – as there is no place to land in the jungle. He chooses south – for no good reason – and within 20 minutes they find the town and land safely.
May your holy walls, to their highest point, resound with mourning! May your giguna be reduced to a pile of dust! May your pilasters with the standing lahama deities fall to the ground like tall young men drunk on wine! May your clay be returned to its abzu, may it be clay cursed by Enki! May your grain be returned to its furrow, may it be grain cursed by Ezinu! May your timber be returned to its forest, may it be timber cursed by Ninilduma! May the cattle slaughterer slaughter his wife, may your sheep butcher butcher his child! May water wash away your pauper as he is looking for…! May your prostitute hang herself at the entrance to her brothel! May your pregnant cult prostitutes abort their children!
This idea that Fate/luck is a SIGNIFICANT random wild card in our life was something ancient cultures were well aware of but one we of the modern world ignore – at our own peril. The book of Job is a classic lamentation based upon the idea that we can do everything “right”, but still suffer. It turns out that it is based upon previous Mesopotamian Lamentations that are even harsher in their emphasizing the reality that if “the Gods” – in modern terms the random events of life like the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs – decide that you are going to suffer there is nothing much you can do about it. The Curse of Akkad, quoted above, is one of the earliest poems about this makes Job’s suffering and the injustice he suffers seem like a walk in the park. It is. Here’s what happened. Sargon of Akkad created the world’s first empire 4,000 years ago and he thought none could conquer his powerful kingdom. He was wrong. A disastrous drought in Mesopotamia helped toppled the Akkadian civilization. Of course, they did not know about climate change and ascribed the mass death that happened to them as due to the will of the Gods.
In my eyes what we are doing adds up to the same thing as “the will of Gods is that we suffer’. Only, our situation is worse in two regards. First, Sargon did not create the drought and we are knowingly creating Climate Change and Biosphere destruction and still do next to nothing about it. Second, that was a local drought while today’s Ecological Catastrophe is global. If we think of the instrument of Fate as being Gaia we can see that Gaia rolled the dice 4,000 years ago and there a drought in the Middle East; resulting in the collapse of the world’s FIRST civilization – a warning to all those civilizations to follow. A warning that has mostly been ignored because we, of course, are special and unique and unlike all the civilizations before us! If there was ever a ridiculous statement that is it. As Michael Dowd puts it so eloquently in his video entitled
“Sanity 101: Living Fully in an Age of Decline (Basic Training) Essential Wisdom for Hard Times” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeDcreVILTE
Most human focused city based civilizations [unlike indigenous ones that have a focus on the fact that they are part of a greater whole and are not the centre of everything] destroy themselves. It seems to be that the Fates have empowered Gaia to teach us a lesson similar to that of ancient Akkad – you are not gods and had better learn some humility and live in harmony with those around you – both human and non-human.
And why does this type of disaster keep happening to civilizations? The most obvious reason is Hubris. Pride. The original tale of evil told in the Bible constantly coming back to haunt us – whether you believe in Satan or not because it’s really a story about human nature and our arrogance. Satan is simply the most beautiful and smartest Angel who becomes a narcissist and is thus tossed out of Heaven to live on the Earth. Sound like us. In our modern internet age narcissism and anti-social personalities are common and often rewarded. To be successful you have to be a bastard and be willing to step over people. It seems that our civilizations does not accept that the Fates are weaving our destinies along with our Free Will and the choices we make for good and evil. It seems to me that our civilization is suffering from the delusion is that we are like gods and are in total control of our destinies. Doesn’t sound healthy to me. Doesn’t seem to me that our civilization is any different from that of Sargon. And yet hope springs eternal. Perhaps we could we try to be different and not collapse as Michael Dowd and many others think is now inevitable?
What can you and I do in our lives with this little gem of an idea to work towards building a future in which human life continues? Realize that you are not totally in control of our life and that is OK. Let the Fates play with you and don’t question them – or they may decide to mess with you even more – and that is often not in our favour. Realize that in the phase of human history we are in events are soon going to take over your life and make survival something you cannot take for granted – you will have to be smart and plan ahead and work with other good people to survive. Fate has arrived for our civilization. For Akkad it was a drought, for us it is total Biosphere collapse. When Akkad collapsed people like Abraham left for “the promised land”. Now, there is no place to go. And yet, giving up is not an option. Despair is a dead end that only leads to the future you want to avoid and is thus not an option. And rely on luck. Because in some magical way we make our luck. Ernest Gann relied on luck and we know this because he survived – why? He would say his actions had nothing to do with his survival but I would say that he did play one small important role: he never gave up and he always saw opportunities when others did not. What can you do? Fly safely like Gann and be lucky. Grow that luck by seeing the opportunities that are opening up as others close. And never give up, even as the world all around you melts as it is doing around me at the cottage on a winter’s day that is well above zero on New Year’s day. And never forget that Fate is the Hunter and is chasing you right now.
The Fates weaving the threads of our lives
Ian Macaulay says
and then there is Murphys law. and Peters principle.
Gordon Kubanek says
ian
re – fate is the hunter
it is a GREAT book and his point about fate is very well made, hits you in the guts