Fate will take from you and I that which is most precious to us: loved ones, careers, offspring, partners, or ability. You and I might not be prepared for Fate; and we can’t fully prepare.
You can remind yourself that your life, or the lives of those you love, can end at any moment. You can imagine to yourself that you will respond with equanimity and stillness. You might be preparing yourself in the wrong way - you might be intellectualizing your fear.
To intellectualize our fear, is to break apart the future into little parts and examine them as If we were living that future right now. That’s not possible. Instead, what if we visualized ourselves submitting to Fate and to our experience?
Visualize a moment in the future that you fear - say the loss of a loved one. How might you see yourself radically accepting that news? When you think about yourself fully experiencing that moment, what kinds of emotions do you imagine you might experience?
If I have learned anything from the pandemic it is this: we will never truly know ourselves until we are forced by Fate to walk in our own shoes.
