Fate and Agency

A few weeks ago, during an online event, someone asks the question, “What is fate and what is agency?”

I write it down. Even though, like Antony sings in the Antshillvania story I listened to as a child, I live by the idea that, “I’m the master of my fate. I’m the captain of my soul.” Still, some sesame seed sized superstitious bit of me imagines the wheeling machinations of a fated world with each one of us being moved into place like chess pieces across some massive board or maneuvered by some puppeteer to the center of a stage and then off again.

For what end? To what purpose? Perhaps all these thoughts are just a side effect of being a fiction writer. For because of that, I explore the infinite strings of Outcome. What if? How about? Or maybe this? I imagine what ifs for nearly everything—real or imagined—even while as a human, I resent the idea of being manipulated. I resent the idea of others being manipulated in real life and fiction. At the end of the day, as a human (and perhaps also as a writer) I would choose agency over fate.

After my grandmother’s stroke when her agency has seemed to diminish, and with some uncertain things exploding like popcorn in my own life, the question plays on repeat, off and on, and in continuously changing iterations in my mind. What is fate and what is agency? Is there fate? If there is, who controls it? On the other hand, what is agency? What does it even mean? How does it look? What in life is fate and what in life is agency? Is there a difference?

As if all things are connected, while reading The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk, M.D., I stumble across this definition. It says: “Agency” is the technical term for the feeling of being in charge of your life: knowing where you stand, knowing that you have a say in what happens to you, knowing that you have some ability to shape your circumstances. (p113)  

With my grandmother, I do my best to remind her whenever I can that she’s still in charge of her fate because she still has agency even though so many things feel out of her control. It’s a really good reminder for me too. Since, on a slightly less intense level, I’m working through a very similar lesson. I’m brought more than once to the idea that it’s not beneficial in the long-term to keep asking, Why is this happening to me? Or to dwell on, This is not fair. For many things are not fair. Many, many things. And life is a constant, changing, never-ending stream of happenings that too often feel fateful. Agency is choosing how to interpret them. Agency is taking charge. Agency is taking responsibility. 

Maybe fate and agency are really only mindset perspectives. Nothing is real. Everything is real. My life is fashioned and fated. Or I have the ability to shape my circumstances. How Zen, how Nihilistic, how Realistic, how Fill in the Blank do I want to be? Fate can be the simple viewpoint that everything happens for a reason. And perhaps, as a flip side to that strange coin, agency is the ability to define that reason.

I’m returned to this thought yet again at the Frida Kahlo Immersive that I go to with my sister and a friend. As I watch Frida’s paintings and the photographs of her and her life shimmer across the walls of the rooms, as the music builds the drama showing her view of her world, her experience with pain, her passions, I remember what she once wrote to a friend, “I have suffered two serious accidents in my life, one in which a bus knocked me to the ground… the other accident is Diego.”

At the age of eighteen, the bus Frida was riding was struck by a streetcar. This disastrous event broke her spinal column in three places, shattered her knee, and sent a wooden rail into her abdomen. It feels almost unnecessary to say that she dealt with the painful effects of these injuries for the rest of her life.

At the age of twenty-two, she married Diego Rivera, an artist twenty years her senior. Their marriage was marked by infidelities (on both their parts), passion, art, a miscarriage that nearly took her life, and communism. Though they divorced at one point, they seemed to be unable to live with or without each other and remarried with a new platonic spin that helped keep them together.

By the way she worded her letter, Frida seems to have counted both accidents as fate. But what if the streetcar was fate and her life with Diego was a result of her agency? Does that change anything? Would that distinction have helped her? In the end, does it matter?

The Immersive comes to an end and then starts over again on its 42-minute cycle. I join up with my sister and friend and together we head out into the open air, back to the car. As I drive us down the highway, I wonder if perhaps, to absolutely misquote Hamlet, “There is neither fate nor agency, but thinking makes it so.”

 

 

[The moral of Anthillvania is actually the opposite of Antony’s initial claim on his thwarted path toward self-actualization; it discourages the wicked self-centeredness of individualism (and TV watching as well). The central message is: Diligence is quite a virtue, working hard will never hurt you. And also, not in these exact words, “There’s no place like home.” Certainly not exactly bad things to realize, but neither is self-actualization.]