If life exists in motion, the ways we define it have never been easy to pin down. From determinism to Cleromancy, every philosophy has a different view of the forces guiding the arc of human life, and the hierarchy thereof. In my time reflecting on this question, I’ve held a number of different viewpoints, none of which I can describe concisely. Eventually, I think that defining life motion must terminate at a balance between Intention, Nature, and Destiny — three compatible schools of thought in conflict and interaction that guide the future of our lives.
In my seventeen years guided by those forces, I haven’t made too many hugely consequential decisions. Perhaps that’s why my decision to come to Andover stands out so clearly as a deciding point in my life. Andover changes all of our lives in different ways, and for me, there’s no doubt that I wouldn’t be the same person I am today without that choice and the choices and circumstances leading to it. I was never supposed to come to Andover until the year it happened, but I can think of no better way to understand who I am today than examining those choices and circumstances to model for why.
To me, Intention is the most comforting of the three characters. Intention suggests reason, which in its turn suggests control; a world defined and understood through explicable cause and effect. Under Intention alone, nothing happens without the input of the self, who is rendered an observer alone under a view adhering purely to either of the other characters. The issue of Intention is that the world does not operate on the reasonable cause and effect, it is dependent on. Intention can explain that I chose to come to Andover so I could act in line with the way I felt, but it can’t begin to capture what that feeling entails, or fully explain why that never seemed to be an option before. Intention may suppose that my struggles with identity at my last school stem from its incongruity with my upbringing, but that can’t explain why others I knew in similar circumstances did fine. There is an element of human chance in our lives that Intention and consequence can’t capture, because we are creatures of faith and nature as much as we are of reason.
Nature is the easiest of these explanations to reach for in abstract terms, but the most challenging (at least for me) to grapple with. “Why do things happen?” Because they do. “Why are things the way they are?” Because they are. “Who am I?” Doesn’t matter, never will. Simple as that, and just as frustrating. I cannot abide the belief that we are defined by Nature because I cannot abide the belief that the choices we make and the people we choose to be are irrelevant. I cannot believe free will is an illusion, so I must reject Nature as an all-encompassing explanation. This stance creates another risk, however, as Nature’s not-explanations have a place in our lives, if only because nothing else fits any better. I can’t explain every intricacy of why I am the person I am, and Nature allows me to make peace with that inability. We can’t settle for an explanation better than those we can reach, and if we can’t reach one at all, it’s better we learn to live with that. Maybe Nature didn’t choose that I would come to Andover, but it just might have decided that I had to.
Where Intention gives us all of the power and Nature gives us none of it, Destiny seems to delegate that power to a nebulous someone else on our behalf. Destiny tells us that nothing can be explained purely through reason or chance; things happen because they fit into an order that exists; we just can’t make sense of it. Destiny suggests that I had to lose some sense of self at my last school in order to recognize it when I found it at Andover; it suggests that the first whisper I heard of a boarding school fair as a fourth-grader was foreshadowing for a greater plan; it relies on the suggestion that life’s motion is benign and powerful and omniscient in ways that aren’t for us to understand. Perhaps most importantly, Destiny is the only character that can reasonably claim to have all the answers in order, and share none of them with us nonetheless. Destiny might venture to comfort us, but can never do so itself; instead, it asks us to place our faith in the notion that it knows best. Destiny is to religious faith in the same sense that Nature is to human nature and Nature is to free will, and it’s appropriately the most difficult of the three to conceptualize. Destiny is the only character that can tell me I belong here, but it can’t make me believe that as Nature can or rationalize it as Nature can.
Life exists in motion, and who we are is defined in that context. Intention, Nature, and Destiny bring their own niches and shortcomings to the question of our lives and identities, and I can’t tell you where their balance should lie. The way each of us understands these characters today is not how we will understand them tomorrow, because who we are today is not who we will be tomorrow. That’s how I describe life in motion, and a life in motion is a life beautiful enough to be worth living.
