“The power of love upsets the order of things.”*

“The power of love upsets the order of things.”*For years men and women have written about “fate” and “destiny.”  From my perspective, fate represents a kind of unconsciousness or reactivity.  A bit like getting up each day and telling an 8 year old to make his bed, yet no bed is made.  You repeat the action the next day expecting different results, but alas, you get an unmade bed.  Then one day you do something different and get different results.  The day that you do something different I think you step off the wheel of fate and onto the path of destiny.  There is a momentum of sorts to fate, the power of lethargy or the status quo.  It is hard to think of something new and different to do, the seductiveness of unconscious or reactive actions looms large in all of our lives and therefore in all of our organizations, families and governments.Yet, the quote says, “The power of love upsets the order of things.”  I interpret the order of things to be “fate.”  To be “the way we have always done it.”  The order of things is conventional wisdom.  Please note it wasn’t always so; what is now “how we have always done it” or conventional wisdom was once the new idea that upset the order of things!  So, we might think of fate and destiny as two forces in life: fate being a current we must swim against in order to get to shore and destiny is shore.  Except this happens each moment.  So destiny is not static or “there.”  It is earned again in each moment.The power of love is the other important aspect of the quote.  We might substitute, energy, passion, or the random and unexpected for the word love.  What upsets fate and shifts us into destiny is more familiar to the Western mind as energy or passion.  How many lovers have thought to themselves in the original throes of the bloom of love, “I am a better me with my beloved.”  Or maybe, “I am the best me” with that person.  For love we risk being out of our comfort zone, because we love and because we feel loved.  And all of a sudden, the siren song of safety is not alive and running our lives, but rather the song of adventure and possibility.  In my view, that is exactly what we are here for: to come alive. And, the power of love will help us leave the path of fate and jump over to the path of destiny.“Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”  Howard Thurman *Quote from Genesis Rabbah LV8 and embedded in the text at this link:http://www.js.emory.edu/BLUMENTHAL/Akeda,%20Zach.htm.**Acknowledgement to 8.4.12 conversation with Bridget Boland and to James Hollis and his book, What Matters Most:  Living a More Considered Life, for informing my thinking on fate and destiny.