Is there an outcome in our lives straight ahead that can’t be avoided? Is there predestination? Or do we have a choice? And if things are totally random, how can someone like me even exist? I was born in a blizzard. My high school graduation on the football field was interrupted by a sudden thunderstorm and downpour, causing a sudden and chaotic relocation to the school auditorium. i have actually lost a coin flip 12 times in a row, narrowly avoiding the unlucky number thirteen. I even lost the most embarrassing strip poker game of my young life.
So, what is destiny?
As an Existentialist, I can say with some certainty that I believe this statement is true; “Existence precedes essence.”
Of course that means you are now thinking, “What the hell does that mean, you goofy Mickey, you?!”
So, here it is; A cadoopa-keeloopa does not exist. But if I build a complex machine out of tinker toys and Legos that uses a green plastic flag to knock over a chessboard where I am losing a game to the Grim Reaper, and I then name that machine, “cadoopa-keeloopa,” it suddenly exists, and it’s essence of cadoopa-keeloopa-ness has been established. That makes perfect sense, right?
Of course, it doesn’t! Not in the case of considering destiny.
How do you prove that destiny has existence? To know for certain what is going to happen, you must first wait for it to happen. The event that happens is existence. How do you prove that no other happening could take place? The puzzle pieces are designed to fit together in only one way, right? But anybody who has ever done a jigsaw puzzle knows that you can complete the puzzle no matter what order you use to put the pieces together. Someone putting together a 500-piece picture of Michelangelo’s David will invariably start in the middle, putting together David’s penis first and his face second. And those of us who think less logically will start with the corner pieces and do the outer edges first. And no matter the first steps, or the middle steps, you end up with the same picture at the end.
Argue the matter with me if you dare, but we are born, we piece together our lives step by step, and when the picture is complete, we die.
So, Destiny is an essence without a provable existence. God has not fore-ordained any conclusion. A jigsaw puzzle will show you the complete picture on the cover of the box. But God doesn’t put any picture for reference on the box our lives come in. That would be proof of destiny. He doesn’t even provide the box for all the pieces. So, there is no set outcome to our lives on Earth.
Which is a good thing for me. As I have told you. I am one of the unluckiest men to ever live on this planet (and not be wiped out by misfortune in childhood.) So, if God gave me a puzzle box with a picture on the top, I would invariably be missing at least one piece. If not a dozen.
So, the shape, size, and outcomes of our lives have nothing do with destiny. The picture that takes shape as we put together the puzzle of life is completely in our hands. At least the part of it that isn’t someone else’s picture made from someone else’s puzzle pieces. And we all put it all together as willy nilly (or even Milly Vanilly via lip-syncing) as is humanly possible.
Catch a Falling Star 
The Sedentary Stradivarius
The greatest tragedy known to man is the finely-tuned instrument that is merely sitting, barely active, when instead it should be soaring to heights never seen before.
It is a real shame that so much of human endeavor is bent towards the accumulation of wealth… And when the lucky few reach the pinnacle of that wealth-acquisition, measured in billions, they choose to hoard it and salt it away for their own exclusive use rather than solve problems like poverty, hunger, ignorance, pollution, violence, and want. The act of creation, being musical, artistic, literary, or profound, is given so little value that the idea of the starving artist is an idea that exists in every head.
I fear that far too many people don’t t truly understand what value means. For life to be worth living, you have to have priorities that justify mankind’s very existence. Surely we were not created… by either God or an indifferent random universe… to merely exist like the blue-green lichen that graces the bark of a rotting stump, or to elect Donald Trump as President just so we can see smarty-pants liberal elitists chopped down by a corrupt plague of racist frogs. The tragedy lies in the knowing… or the not knowing.
Perhaps you recognize Beethoven’s 9th Symphony when you hear the Dah-Dah-Dah-Dummm! of death knocking in that familiar musical phrase. But do you recognize the pastoral beauty of the sunshine-and-rain-filled 5th Symphony? Or have you heard the sorrow and the striving of daily life in the city streets depicted in the 7th Symphony (offered above)? If not, why not? How can you listen to any of it and not hear the many underlined reasons that it is considered among the greatest music ever created? And that by a man who was mildly insane and eventually stone deaf, unable to hear his own music anywhere but in his imagination?
I have reached a point in my life that I cannot do much beyond sit and think such thoughts. I am limited in how I can move and what work I can do by my ever-more-painful arthritis, stinging me in every joint. I am also limited by lack of money in where I can go and what I can afford to do. But I refuse to be that finely-tuned instrument that does not make much in the way of music. Hence, an essay like this one today. It is me, using my words to the best of my ability, to fill the sky with hopelessly beautiful attempts at making the stars twinkle.
Leave a comment
Filed under artwork, classical music, commentary, feeling sorry for myself, insight, Paffooney, philosophy, review of music
Tagged as artistry, Beethoven