Life with Destiny

A few years ago, I wrote my memoirs. Doing that, I reviewed my life, which has been unusual. In my memoirs, I have recorded events of my life from the time I was a child until I settled down in the United States. I lived through the rise of Nazism, World War II (WWII), the Holocaust and the Gulag, the breakdown of the British empire and the Soviet empire, the supremacy of the United States, and the resurgence of China, some of the most significant changes in the world that have certainly influenced my life. Reviewing this history, I started thinking about my life, and I concluded that two actions prevailed: marrying Sidonia and moving from communist Romania to the United States. These major accomplishments have shaped my life in such a way that looking back, I see no other event that would have had a similar impact. There were times when the road could have taken a different turn, and I was amazed to find out how my actions brought me closer to a destination that was not set up by me. I followed what I thought was my way, but then I recognized that I went through it as a pawn moved on the chess table. As I looked at where I came from—how I met Sidonia and we got to know each other and how we managed to break away from the Iron Curtain and start a new life in the United States—I was stunned by how extraordinary these deeds have been and was puzzled that they were not my initial goals. By the time I encountered Sidonia, marriage and love were not in my vocabulary, and I had never dreamed of moving to the United States. The United States was for me, another world that I knew only from movies and books. I was not interested in leaving Romania where I was born and where I was developing my professional position. Still, when one connects the dots, the plot had very distinct aims: to bring the two of us together and to move us away from a totalitarian regime to a free world. This conclusion made me look at how these and other actions have occurred, and what I found was so striking that it made me change my life viewpoint. Each of these major events was the result of a chain of occurrences that were linked, creating a certain pathway leading to a goal that I was not even considering. The story was so intricate and unpredictable that it made me question if chance, defined as a purposeless, unplanned, and uncontrollable force that shapes events favorably or unfavorably, could by itself have accomplished these amazing feats. People usually attribute their accomplishments to their talents, challenging work, persistence, and sometimes give credit to chance. How many times does one hear the explanation, “It was just good luck”? When the outcome was beneficial, it was difficult to believe that what occurred was only a matter of good luck. How many times could one win the lottery? As I tried to understand how major events of my life were set up, I recognized that ordinary episodes, which started far apart and appeared disconnected, elicited tracks that had a predetermined target. If I considered each of these events to happen as they did, their likelihood was negligible beyond reality. To assume that these events happened the way they did by chance seemed a delusion. Considering the way these events came about, it was hard not to accept that they were due to an authority that drove me on selected pathways. Reviewing events that shaped my life made me wonder how they were connected and what made them happen. Pondering different options to answer these questions, my conclusion was that there is an authority that has directed my life the way it was. I call this authority destiny or fate. The belief that individual life is decided by an authority or a force has been with humans since ancient times. People ascribe to destiny or fate, the development of events with beneficial or detrimental consequences in their life that are beyond a person’s control. At the time they occur, such events may have only perceptible immediate consequences, but eventually, they trigger major changes in the life course. Sometimes individuals admit that “it was fate or destiny,” but most of the time, this statement is not backed up by facts. One example of the way I examined these events could be how I met Lisa, my fiancée. Being assigned as an interpreter of the Romanian delegation at the International Youth Festival in Poland, I met Klaus who was also an interpreter. After we returned home, he asked me to call him so that we could continue our association. I called, and he invited me to his family home where I met his sister Lisa with whom I fell in love and became engaged. When I look at the chain of events that led to our encounter, I find out that the initial event happened when, as a first-grade elementary school pupil, my mother enrolled me in an optional English class. This was followed by private English lessons and being employed as an interpreter by the youth organization. Those were the circumstances that led to our encounter, and I did not know how Klaus became an interpreter, which was another condition without which we would have never met. The take-home tidbit was that events that apparently have no direct connection could lead to outcomes that are unpredictable. Who or what set them up? When I expanded the search over my life, the reasonable answer to these questions was that there is an authority that controls our life by setting up major goals and taking us to fulfill them.