Feeling powerless is not a place most of us as adults enjoy.
However, these two big words are romanticised, confused and misused way too often for the liking of this devoted, apprentice wordsmith.
What makes sense to me, and I would like to share this for your consideration as today’s dual Word Vitamin to digest, if FATE and DESTINY have been words that have pissed you off too when used in a vague, powerless victim’s context.
FATE it seems is what Mother Nature and Father Time (Universal Laws or God, whatever works for you)) dictates that we are born into and need to experience in our life’s journey to season our individual character.
Our FATE is in the hands of a higher power and beyond our control; therefore we actually need to honour it, not fight it. For example, our skin colour, sexual gender preference, biological family or the absence of one, biological DNA enduring “acts of God” like tsunamis, earthquakes, droughts and floods. We are all powerless human beings when it comes to these acts of FATE in my personal view.
DESTINY, however, seems to not be a matter of circumstance, as FATE tends to be, but a matter of choice. Our DESTINY, I believe, is about how we play the hand FATE deals us.
DESTINY is not a thing to be waited for, it is a thing to be achieved. DESTINY is about what we create with what FATE gave us.
I remember going to one of my first recovery meetings back in 1995 and being told the medical statistics about sustained long-term recovery from addiction.
A defeated looking woman told me that the stats are even smaller for females. This was just our DESTINY; we had to accept as women she assured me. I nodded, but silently refused to agree with her. There and then I made a choice. I understood my FATE, but refused to let my fear sabotage my DESTINY.
It has been explained to me over the years by many leading medical professionals about my addictive DNA. It seems it was my biological FATE. The cards I was dealt, and the DNA I have passed on to my divine two sons, making it their FATE too to carry this challenging gene involuntarily. Sometimes the gene becomes active, sometimes it remains inactive, and it is in FATE’s hands.
So I have come to believe now that the best years of our life are our recovery years. The years where we work on our Emotional Fitness to build our character. When we decide our problems are our own we cease blaming them on anyone or anything. This is when our character cranks up a gear and we commence to create our own DESTINY. This is what Scott Peck writes about in The Road Less Travelled.
A few years back Mr Delicious and I were in Hawaii travelling and I decided I needed to attend a recovery meeting. At this Hawaiian meting there were over 100 addicts in attendance, about 25% of them female.
It was a format I’d never experienced before. They asked anyone with over one year’s consistent abstinence (without any relapse) to stand. I stood up with 80% of the room. The chairperson then asked for those with three years to remain standing and 50% sat down. It continued. We were asked to remain standing if we had five years abstinence; more people sat down, only twenty of us remaining. Once the question reached 10 years of consistent abstinence I was the only woman left standing along with three other men.
So sadly many years later these stats still exist. However, in my home town of Brisbane nowadays, it seems there are more women that share my view, that is that those stats suck! I now personally know several divine women with over 15 years up. In my view discipline, robust personal boundaries and self respect, not just desire … creates our DESTINY.
Let’s do our best to remember our DESTINY is tied to our heart’s individual character. The good news is that if someone ever dies or leaves us they are unable to destroy or take our DESTINY with them.
It is not FATE that holds our DESTINY, but our own beautiful heart that does.
This Word Vitamin is an excerpt from my latest bookset “The Four Seasons of the Heart”. If you would like to order your own full set of Daily Word Vitamins one for each day of the year, in book form for yourself or as a gift for someone you care about just click on the SHOP tab and place your order.
Lotsa love Cynthia xxx
© Copyright 2016 Cynthia J. Morton Emotional Fitness™
Image Source Unknown
