Tuesday, June 7, 2016

Amor Fati

From Elizabeth Lesser's Facebook page.   Gosh, she's good. 
“AMOR FATI means love of fate. The philosopher ...Friedrich Nietzsche described amor fati as the ability not to merely bear our fate but to love it. That’s a tall order. To be human is to have the kind of fate that doles out all sorts of wondrous and horrible things. No one gets through life without big doses of confusion and angst, pain and loss. What’s to love about that? And yet if you say yes to amor fati, if you practice loving the fullness of your fate, you will thread ribbons of faith and gratitude and meaning through your life. Some will reject the idea of loving your fate as capitulation or naïveté; I say it’s the way to wisdom and the key to love.”
Remembering those two words this morning had the effect of lifting me out of negativity, fear, and resistance. I took a deep breath and let it out with a sigh. AHHHH. That’s right. I remember. I don’t have to fight with fate. I can stand in the storms of life—whether it’s my daughter-in-law’s breast cancer treatments, or the hatred being whipped in this year’s presidential campaign, or the fact that I am standing as I type this because my back has gone out again…I can embrace all of this with an open heart. I can feel the tenderness of the human condition, shower love on myself and on the people in my life, and relax into my fate and the fate of our shared world. Meeting life with loving acceptance does not condemn me to inactivity. In fact it energizes me, gives me hope, and reveals better next steps.
Nietzsche wrote this: “I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! . . . And all in all and on the whole: some day I wish to be only a Yes-sayer.”

                                             Elizabeth Lesser's photo.