“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” - C.G. Jung
I was listening to an audiobook on my walk last night, and that quote by Jung stopped me in my tracks. YES. Precisely.
We are not transparent, clean slates. We have histories and memories and hurts and trauma and tribes and fears and beliefs and hopes and biases and patterns and conditioning and learned responses and responsibilities and anxieties and cosmologies and libidos and dreams and nightmares and projections and defenses and chips on our shoulders and stars in our eyes.
These codes are running in our operating systems all the time. They in part determine what we're going to see before we even open our eyes and how we're going to interpret it. They’ve set up the gameboard each day before we roll the dice or reach for our piece.
They operate in synch to create the milieu, the worldview in which we each exist. We fold ourselves to fit within their parameters and color within their lines. And they become the invisible walls of our worlds, of the mazes we move through. They become the unacknowledged building blocks of the fate that seems to direct so many of our actions and responses.
Until we wake up from the trance. Until we become students of ourselves and begin (however imperfectly) to question our own thoughts and perceptions and interpretations and reactions, with curiosity and compassion. (Pro tip: humor helps, too.)
In that process, we begin to get leverage. We see opportunities, not inevitabilities. And we become more at choice in how we live our lives and defy our so-called fates.