Giving fate a chance to intervene

I’ve been under the weather for the past few days. The world must have read what I said about being twistedly envious of Charles Darwin’s extended sicknesses and took it literally. As shitty as it feels, it has allowed me to finally take a small, much needed break. Yesterday was the first day in probably a year that I did no work at all.

I’ve gotten into a rhythm of listening to podcasts when I can instead of music. Typically I go through a podcast phase once every year or so, before deciding I’ve been intaking too much information and need a break. Joe Rogan’s podcast has been hitting the spot for me. He brings on a variety of guests from different backgrounds and has wildly stimulating conversations. The amazing part is, Rogan never asks questions, like in a typical interview. He never says “So, you’re a mathematician—tell me about math.” Instead, he’ll just start blabbering about some random current event and finds a way to flow it from there.

The most recent one I listened to was with Dan Carlin of Hardcore History. Dan Carlin and Joe Rogan combined in one podcast is the meeting of two legendary podcasters. Dan’s insight on current events and history, especially that of the Middle East, is extremely fascinating and enlightening. I highly recommend giving it a listen.

They talked at some length about, essentially, quitting your shitty job to go do something you’re passionate about instead. And Dan said something I really liked. He said that when you take action towards your goals or dreams—any action—you give fate a chance to intervene. I’ve always suspected that as hostile as the universe may be, it does want us to succeed (as a whole at least). And so when you take one step towards your goals, or an action, there is an equal and opposite reaction on the part of the universe. The universe will never ever make her actions obvious, as to arouse suspicion. We call it luck, or fate, or chance, but in reality, these are the mechanisms the world employs to help you grow from a tiny seedling into a colossal tree.

But here’s the thing: because of nature’s desire to be sneaky and not leave any clues, it’ll never help you if you don’t at first help yourself. When you help yourself, and receive some good will back from the world, you associate it with your effort, and thus nature has you fooled into thinking you are growing by your own accord, when in reality there are a million forces acting on your world to make it expand.

All that to say, when you take action in the direction of your goals, you give fate a chance to intervene. If however you remain indolent and idle, for nature to help you then would surely violate her principle of suppressing suspicion. Put another way, this amounts to “The harder you work, the luckier you get.” Both of these combined work based on the assumption that nature has good intentions for its inhabitants, which I absolutely believe it does. We’ve made it this far, haven’t we?