“…the future is beautiful, alright? Look out the window. It’s sunny every day here. It’s like manifest destiny. Don’t tell me we didn’t make it. We made it! We are here. And everything that is past is prologue to this. All of the shit that didn’t kill us is only… you know, all that shit. You’re gonna get over it.” – Rob (Ron Livingston), Swingers
I’ve been thinking a lot about destiny. What it is, what it means, how it works.
Every day when I pull a tarot card or cards for the day, I journal them. Sometimes at night I just play with the cards, trying to get a feel for them and for reading. Last night I pulled some cards not to journal, but because I wanted an answer about something.
One of the cards that popped out was the Wheel of Fortune card (from the Wild Unknown Deck). It’s a gorgeous card, messy and colorful and full of meaning. At the top, a crescent moon and stars. The man picture of the card resembles a Native American medicine wheel that’s been made from yarn and twigs. A colorless sun shines beneath the wheel. An owl sits perches atop the highest twig branch.
The meaning of this card is heavy. As a 10 card it represents completion – the end of a cycle. The Wheel itself represents change rolling in, sometimes good and sometimes uncomfortable, but always necessary. I see this card as a positive one, as change brings growth and growth leads us to our highest good. In the guidebook, it says the Wheel of Fortune is the card of Destiny.
Long after I’d pulled the cards and studied them, I kept thinking about the concept of Destiny. Is it something that happens, or something that just is? Does it happen to us or for us? Do we all face our destiny, do we create our destiny, do we have the power to change our destiny (because free will is obviously a thing).
The more I thought about it, the more I realized that the truth of the wheel is much simpler than that. I hopped out of bed, grabbed my journal and a pen, and scribbled:
“What if it’s less about finding destiny or destiny happening to us? What if I AM destiny?”
Boom. Lightning moment for me. What if I – what if we all – have much more power than we believe, or were told, or have ever imagined possible, over our future and how our lives play out?
Maybe destiny is something that, on the path to spiritual enlightenment, we begin to meld with? To have the thing, we must BE the thing, right? To have joy, we must be joy. To have love, we must first be love. This is how we match vibration and allow things to become true in our lives.
So… what if to activate a certain destiny, to realize our fate, all we have to do is become it? Similar to a choose your own adventure novel, where one path leads to page 24 and another leads to page 116 and we get to decide our own ending. What if that’s been the point all along? Through shadow work, meditation, visualization, inspired action, learning, teaching, growing, loving, laughing, experiencing, and believing before we see, we both sketch out or own future – which is fluid and in motion, like the Wheel – and then step into it?
What an epiphany. That’s destiny, manifested.
Attitude Soup 