The gods toy with us

I think the ancient Greeks were onto something.

One of the recurring themes of Greek tragedies is that despite our individuality, our personal skills, efforts, in the end our lives are predetermined by our past and our circumstances. We can try to avoid our destiny but we are ultimately doomed to follow it.

I am at the end of one phase of my life and on the cusp of beginning another. As I look back over my life, I understand how this all came about. I can look back over the 21+ years of my marriage and before that into my and my wife's childhoods and see how everything followed almost inevitably from the past.

Even now, although I feel like I made a clear and deliberate choice about separating from my wife, I'm not sure I really had a choice. I tried keeping it together, to just "get past" the hurt and betrayal of her infidelity, and I couldn't, I simply couldn't. So what choice did I really have in the end? What were my choices: to go insane? To be angry and resentful the rest of my life? No, there was only one reasonable choice, which is to say there were none.

I think I am making choices about my future, but what choices do I really have, in the big picture? Changing one's destiny is like changing the course of a ship, hard, slow, and in the end, if the current is swift enough, impossible.

Nonetheless, I am unique, just like everyone else, and like everyone else, I value the illusion of free-choice and autonomy. That being the case, I will go through the motions of making good choices, the best choices I know how to, hoping the play the gods have me in involves me being happy.