Time and destiny, two illusions

to replace the fear, of being slowly

pulled, in to the end.

I wrote this for Day 1108. I always wonder what people mean when they say that they are destined to do this or that. Do they just mean that the circumstances of their life has put them on a road with a certain destiny? Like being born athletic, in a place where they could practice sports, and in a family that supports them. Is that a path, to a destiny?

I suspect that when people talk about destiny, soul mates or say that it is “meant to be” that they think that it is written in the stars, sometimes literally. Before the invention of the big monotheistic gods, the gods where powerful but also flawed like humans and certainly not all powerful, at least if you look at the ancient Greek world. The monotheistic Gods where in principal all powerful, and because of this they knew the destiny of every little human being on earth, then, and all of them in the future. Because religion was not something debatable till just a few decades ago, most people still feel that group pressure, mostly unconsciously I presume, that we have a destiny or that there is A destiny.

If life is not designed and made by some sentient being, but the universe is just there, than you have to conclude that there is no destiny predestined for you. Your circumstances, like in my previous example, can give you a destiny but it is only there because you are born.

Time is also one of those illusions. I don’t want to say to much about it, but if you read some book about, for instance, the middle ages you will soon realize that before the invention of timekeeping people had a whole different idea about time. For us time is the 24 hour clock and the calendar, most people in those day’s had no idea about those concepts. Time was the changing of the seasons and the rise of the sun in the morning.

There are many concepts in our modern life that we take for granted. If you look closer to where these things started you will realize that what seems obvious for us, is indeed just that, obvious for us.