H,
I keep thinking of those
early days when the road seemed somewhat simpler than it is now. I am now
tempted to quote Hemingway again mostly because you hate the repetition but: “life
breaks us all…”
Have we not been broken by
the common wheel of everyday life and adventure?  Are we not struggling for balance in the twin
goals of servicing both ambition and destiny?
I hate to put things down
into two simple ideas but just for now let me frame the thing on my mind in
this way: human life as an empty hole that ambition fills sporadically or human
life as a reach for something sublime and away from the everyday tedium of
solving immediate problems.
What has been our ambition
for so long? I know I used to have these pipe dreams of world domination. I believed
in the great advance of public acts and notoriety. I saw a better world as a
natural state of the world in my image. But I was nine or ten with two much
literature on the subject to comprehend what the outside world was really like.
After a while, after a few years, I had a community of opinions of who I should
be. I adjusted. It was in with the Law and out with the Journalism because my
talents were weighed on an imaginary false scale and I was told to adjust
upward. And I did. I always thought of it as not being alone. I wanted to be
common by then and by that I mean I did not want to stick out of any class or
group. Ambition became survival. In the wider world of expectations I was
paralyzed by fear, by doubt and by the idea that I was indeed different but not
in any positive way. I was the proverbial sore thumb and my ambitions could not
be said because they were dumb and somewhat sinful. Not that I had plans on
sinning (that always just happened) but I thought the very idea of ambition was
sin.
Ambition is where you want
to go and destiny is where you will go. If you are a free will sort of person
it is about ambition. You will even summarize you ambition as your destiny. That
is you will say that accepting your destiny will give you some real ambition. If
you are of a more esoteric bent you will find yourself looking for signs in the
metaphysical sphere that tie your destiny and ambition together. You will say
talent leads to goal and goal leads to acts and acts become habit and habit
becomes destiny. Now, it is not an either/or proposition. I routinely find
myself in both places, thinking of the weight of my decisions as well as
looking for signs in the ether of some greater reality to come.
All of this is easier than
just sitting still. All of this is more natural to the hurried state of modern
life than taking a chance on asking the right questions about your own soul. The
life we live now has told us that paying for the things we need and do not need
is the call of the moment. It is ambition to be in the black and it is destiny
to make progress without the pilgrimage.
I have no easy answers to
this question except that I know the disquiet in my soul does not go down with
any victory or any defeat. Negative or positive vibes do not adequately feed my
very human but existential hungers. I suspect that if I wrote down all my goals
in life and ticked them off one by one I would still feel this disquiet. I suspect
that dealing with daily life head on will not cure it and I know hiding under
the bed from troubles will not silence it either. My ambitions are too small
for it and my destiny is still too unknown to comfort it. I still have to look
up and find meaning in connection.
That I have not been doing
at all. That I have to remember is the call to wake up. Ambition is where I want
to go and destiny is where I will go. Both are beyond my immediate grasp. All I
have is the promise of love and the doubts I bring to Him on my knees and in my
heart.