“Of Ambition and Destiny.”

H,

I keep thinking of those early days when the road seemed somewhat simpler than it is now. I am now tempted to quote Hemingway again mostly because you hate the repetition but: “life breaks us all…”

Have we not been broken by the common wheel of everyday life and adventure?  Are we not struggling for balance in the twin goals of servicing both ambition and destiny?

I hate to put things down into two simple ideas but just for now let me frame the thing on my mind in this way: human life as an empty hole that ambition fills sporadically or human life as a reach for something sublime and away from the everyday tedium of solving immediate problems.

What has been our ambition for so long? I know I used to have these pipe dreams of world domination. I believed in the great advance of public acts and notoriety. I saw a better world as a natural state of the world in my image. But I was nine or ten with two much literature on the subject to comprehend what the outside world was really like. After a while, after a few years, I had a community of opinions of who I should be. I adjusted. It was in with the Law and out with the Journalism because my talents were weighed on an imaginary false scale and I was told to adjust upward. And I did. I always thought of it as not being alone. I wanted to be common by then and by that I mean I did not want to stick out of any class or group. Ambition became survival. In the wider world of expectations I was paralyzed by fear, by doubt and by the idea that I was indeed different but not in any positive way. I was the proverbial sore thumb and my ambitions could not be said because they were dumb and somewhat sinful. Not that I had plans on sinning (that always just happened) but I thought the very idea of ambition was sin.

Ambition is where you want to go and destiny is where you will go. If you are a free will sort of person it is about ambition. You will even summarize you ambition as your destiny. That is you will say that accepting your destiny will give you some real ambition. If you are of a more esoteric bent you will find yourself looking for signs in the metaphysical sphere that tie your destiny and ambition together. You will say talent leads to goal and goal leads to acts and acts become habit and habit becomes destiny. Now, it is not an either/or proposition. I routinely find myself in both places, thinking of the weight of my decisions as well as looking for signs in the ether of some greater reality to come.

All of this is easier than just sitting still. All of this is more natural to the hurried state of modern life than taking a chance on asking the right questions about your own soul. The life we live now has told us that paying for the things we need and do not need is the call of the moment. It is ambition to be in the black and it is destiny to make progress without the pilgrimage.

I have no easy answers to this question except that I know the disquiet in my soul does not go down with any victory or any defeat. Negative or positive vibes do not adequately feed my very human but existential hungers. I suspect that if I wrote down all my goals in life and ticked them off one by one I would still feel this disquiet. I suspect that dealing with daily life head on will not cure it and I know hiding under the bed from troubles will not silence it either. My ambitions are too small for it and my destiny is still too unknown to comfort it. I still have to look up and find meaning in connection.

That I have not been doing at all. That I have to remember is the call to wake up. Ambition is where I want to go and destiny is where I will go. Both are beyond my immediate grasp. All I have is the promise of love and the doubts I bring to Him on my knees and in my heart.