Amor Fati (Love your fate)

Marilyn: My Uncle once told me about a warrior who had a fine stallion. Everyone said how lucky he was to have such a horse.

“Maybe", he said.

One day, the stallion ran off. The people said the warrior was unlucky.

"Maybe", he said.

The next day the stallion returned, leading a string of fine ponies. The people said it was very lucky.

"Maybe", the warrior said.

Later, the warrior's son was thrown from one of the ponies and broke his leg. The people said it was unlucky.

"Maybe", the warrior said.

Marilyn: The next week, the chief lead a war party against another tribe. Many young men were killed. But, because of his broken leg, the warrior's son was left behind, and so was spared

Marilyn Whirlwind- Northern Exposure

Life was never crafted for perfection — it was carved through failure. But fear not the fall; for it is in rising, again and again, that resilience forges the soul into something unbreakable.”

King Tolan

When you work as a psychologist, lots of “hot” new ideas, books and concepts come and go. But if you drill down a little, you often find they are simply old ideas repackaged in new boxes.

Let’s look at some quotes from Marcus Aurelius, 1900 years ago or so.

“You have power over your mind - not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.”

“The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts.”

“Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.”

“If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.”

“Our life is what our thoughts make it.”

“Whenever you are about to find fault with someone, ask yourself the following question: What fault of mine most nearly resembles the one I am about to criticize?”

Sound familiar? If so, you would find numerous aspects of Cognitive Behavioural therapy, ACT psychology, and Radical Acceptance all right there.

Friedrich Nietzsche talked about a concept called Amor Fati. To love and accept EVERYTHING that happens to you, regardless if it feels good or bad at first. This idea might seem puzzling to people at first. Surely getting cancer, or going through some awful traumatic experience couldn’t be interpreted as something to love?


Right?


Nietzsche thought so. And concepts such as Posttraumatic growth teach us that some people grow into even stronger, more compassionate versions of themselves after going through some of their worst experiences.


But not everyone.


So as we think about what Nietzsche was really saying here, we are talking about a philosophy of life that can guide us. How many people in your life have you heard say, “When I just win lotto, everything will be amazing!” It’s a common refrain.


And yet, if we look at the lives of a lot of lottery winners, we don’t exactly see this holds up. Plenty end up with lives worse than where they were before. Others lose friendships and marriages over the new dynamic money has created in their lives.


So this “good” thing that happened wasn’t so good after all.


It works the other way as well. Some of the world’s most accomplished people were forged in the fire of absolutely horrible and traumatic childhoods. I think about the recent death of Dolly Parton. She grew up in horrible poverty in Appalachia with a father who couldn’t read and 11 siblings. By the time she died last week she had given away 330 million books to children to encourage them to read.


So was it a “bad” thing Dolly had to grow up like that?


I could provide dozens of more examples on BOTH ends, but you get the point. Sometimes we have to accept that we just don’t know how the story is going to end. Maybe you had your heart broken but it got you out of a relationship that was not healthy for you? Perhaps you were laid off from a job, but then used that as the catalyst to finally return to school or open your own business?


I’ve always believed in this, but also often lose sight of it. Good and bad feel very real in the moments while they are happening. Life punched me VERY hard in the mouth recently, and provided me a with an example that allowed me to deeply reflect on this.


So let me put my money where my mouth is here and tell you a little story from my own life.

A year or so ago I went to the doctor to get checked out. It was something I hadn’t done for a long time. The news was not great. Nothing life and death, but words like high cholesterol and fatty liver and Gerd were coming fast and furious.


My response was to book travel all over the world. I figured it I wasn’t going to be around forever, I might as well see as much of the world as I possibly could, while I still could.


Was this a good decision or a bad decision?


Maybe.


I recently realized what I thought was a dream when I flew into Japan for the first time. I wanted to do EVERYTHING the city had to offer, and it was as excited as I had been in a long time.


And everything went wrong. Horribly wrong in fact. I am to going to spell out the explicit details, but just say that a combination of bad people and bad choices and bad situations meant I have literally never been so happy to get out of a place. And this is coming from someone who has spent a ton of time in Vegas.


I had a month left to go overseas and stayed in a sweltering hot Airbnb with a fan and a single bed.


Was this sequence of events a good thing or a bad thing?

Maybe.

I spent that month in sweltering heat working out every day. Didn’t touch a drop of alcohol, ate extremely healthy and wouldn’t leave the gym until three hours had passed.


At first it just felt like I was depriving myself over and over again. After all, what is being overseas for if not to treat yourself a little? But that was not how I saw it, not what I could afford at that moment, and most importantly, not even what I wanted.


Two weeks in it stopped feeling like deprivation and I started feeling like I couldn’t wait to go to the gym. I read lots of books, felt my clothes getting looser and looser and looser, until finally my time was up.


Here is a rough approximation of some before and after pictures.






When I got back home, I went to the doctor again. This time he was using words like, “how?” and “transformation” and “startling reversal of symptoms.”

So did I take this as a good thing or a bad thing?

Maybe.

Previously, (and sadly there have been a couple of “previouslys,” where I have lost huge amounts of weight). I celebrated by going back to eating too much and drinking beer again. Hardly a great way to celebrate a drastic change in one’s health, but I can’t go back now and do it over again. I did have a look at something I have handed to numerous clients over the years, without always following it.

Ten Rules for Living

1. YOU WILL RECEIVE A BODY
You may like it or hate it, but it will be yours for the entire period this time around.

2. YOU WILL LEARN LESSONS
You are enrolled in a full-time informal school called life. Each day in this school you will have the opportunity to learn lessons. You may not like the lessons, or think them irrelevant and stupid.

3. THERE ARE NO MISTAKES, ONLY LESSONS
Growth is a process of trial and error: Experimentation. The "failed" experiments are as much a part of the process as the experiment that ultimately works.

4. A LESSON IS REPEATED UNTIL LEARNED
A lesson will be presented to you in various forms until you have leaned it. When you have learned it, you can go on to the next lesson.

5. LEARNING LESSONS DOES NOT END
There is no part of life that does not contain it's lessons. If you are alive, there are lessons to be learned.

6. "THERE" IS NO BETTER THAN "HERE"
When your "there" has become a "here," you will simply obtain another "there" that will, again, look better than "here".

7. OTHERS ARE MERELY MIRRORS OF YOU
You cannot love or hate something about another person unless it reflects to you something you love or hate about yourself.

8. WHAT YOU MAKE OF YOUR LIFE IS UP TO YOU
You have all the tools and resources you need. What you do with them is up to you. The choice is yours.

9. YOUR ANSWERS LIE INSIDE OF YOU
The answers to life's questions lie inside you. All you need to do is look, listen, and trust.

10. YOU WILL FORGET ALL THIS

 

I particularly paid attention to that last one.


In the end, I do think there is an extremely powerful idea in paying attention to how we interpret things. Plenty of people missed getting on tragic flights on 9/11 because they were running late or drank too much the night before. I bet they woke up pretty pissed off. Then a couple of hours later felt like the luckiest people on the face of the earth,


We DON’T know how the story ends. Not me, not you, not anyone.


We can learn. We can keep open minds. And yes, we can learn to say, “Maybe” when something seems like an obvious good or bad thing has happened in our lives.


Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.