Calvinball for Dummies.

For a long time I've been, if not loud, at least clear on my view of fate. Predestination, fate, destiny, whatever you call it, I've always taken issue with it. We are masters of our own destiny, and fate is nothing more than that which we should spit at as we move on our own paths. That's the opinion I've held for a long time. But it's something I realize I never put much real thought into. It's the realization of that, and how it's affected my life that's left me inspired today. It bothers me because for all my claiming that fate is an excuse to not act, I have been more than willing to put off my own choices because it's “out of my power”.

Fate by another name is just as much of an excuse though. And it left me with the realization of what it was about this excuse that bothered me. If I sat down and accepted fate, that there was some kind of predetermined path my life would take, that my choice was irrelevant, that would mean that I would have to accept a simple statement: That I was fated to be miserable. If I accept fate, I have to accept that, and this would mean that my misery had no way to change. But for every excuse to live with my misery instead of doing something else to fix it, I'm accepting that.

And of course, recognizing the problem is normally one of the first steps to solving it. It certainly lifted a burden from me. The “problems” I have, in my old way of thinking, really were out of my power. I had no answers, so the problems were out of my power. But like any good underdog story (and everyone with a problem is an underdog), the trick isn't finding the solution to the problem, it isn't a training montage and becoming “good enough”. That's the kind of thinking that gets you in the problem in the first place, doing the same thing over and over. The real answer is a bit trickier, but less frustrating after a while:

Change the problem. We have so much more control over ourselves than we think we do. Not to say we can control ourselves entirely. I've watched people try, and seen it crash and burn terribly. Drug cocktails were the issue there, but sometimes it really is beyond our power to change ourselves through willpower alone. But not often. Chasing after a goal only to find the goal's been blocked off? You can either sit an mope like a good little emo kid, and cry about how you're so powerless and fated to suck at life and everything it entails, or you can say “The goalpost is ten yards further and blocked with barbed wire? Good thing I stopped playing football and started playing ultimate. Shorter field, s'all good”.

Cheat at life. You're playing against a rigged deck against nasty odds, but the dealer's either three blind ladies, or isn't there to begin with, so who's gonna stop you? Play by your own rules, and suddenly landing on that hotel at the boardwalk isn't too bad. I mean, how else will you get the chance to show off your sweet new cyborg-dog (which captains its own battleship)?

But what about the other players? The playing field isn't even if you change the rules, right? Now, that's stretching the metaphor, but let's run with it. If they want to complain because you turned soccer into Calvinball, well, you can't argue much. But that's just it, you don't have to. The game was really just Calvinball from the start, you just hadn't realized it yet. The rules were NEVER set down at the start of the game, and the people that win are the ones that tweak the rules enough to make it work. The trick is remembering that even if you're changing the rules, you can't just throw the board to the ground, burn the field, and say that's how the game is played. There's still boundaries. There's still limits. And you can't change someone else's rules. It's mostly internalized. But you can show them the way.

Nobody's going to give you a map, no matter how much you want one. But saying that there's no map, so you may as well sit down and be where you are despite the rising tides and rain of fire, that's giving up. That's accepting fate. And that's not worth the pain.