This ALAN WATTS Lecture About Destiny Will Give You Goosebumps

If I were to ask you right now, sitting wherever you are, to trace backwards through your life, just to follow the thread of how you arrived at this exact moment.

You would find something very strange, you would find that it makes sense.

Not in the way a textbook makes sense, it's sense in the way a dream makes sense while you're inside it, you know.

That peculiar feeling when you're dreaming and the strangest things happen, a horse walks through your kitchen, your mother has someone else's face and yet you don't question it, it fits, it belongs, only when you wake up do you say, well, that was absurd.

But here's the thing, your life, when you look backwards at it, has that same quality.

It flows, and this is this is worth sitting with for a moment, because we don't experience life that way going forward, do we going forward?

Everything is chaos, uncertainty.

You stand at crossroads and you agonize.

You lie awake at night wondering if you made the wrong turn.

You think if only I had taken that other job, if only I had said yes, if only I had said no, if only I had stayed, if only I had left.

But then 10 years later, you look back and you see that all of it, all the mess, all the wrong turns.

All the detours led exactly here, to this room, this breath.

This moment of your life and you can't find the mistake.

You can find pain.

You can find suffering, you can find things you regret.

But you cannot find the place where you went off the path.

Because here's the secret, nobody tells you.

There was no other path.

This sounds like fatalism, doesn't it?

This sounds like I'm saying, you're a puppet and none of your choices matter.

And everything is predetermined.

And that's a rather gloomy way of looking at things.

But that's not what I'm saying at all.

What I'm pointing to is something much more interesting.

Much more slippery.

And if you can feel it, not think it, but feel it something inside you, will relax in a way it hasn't relaxed in years.

See, we walk around with this constant anxiety that we might miss our life.

That's the fear, isn't it?

Not just that things will be difficult, but that we'll take the wrong road and end up at the wrong destination.

That there was a correct life, the life we were supposed to live, and we somehow wandered off from it.

And we carry this like a weight.

You're carrying it now, maybe some version of it, the sense that you should be further along.

That you made mistakes that cost you.

That the real life, the right life, is happening somewhere else to some other version of you who made better choices.

But I want you to consider something.

What if what if that feeling of being lost was the path?

What if the confusion wasn't a deviation from your journey, but the actual texture of the journey itself?

Cause here's what I've noticed about rivers.

And I'm very fond of rivers because they understand something we don't.

A river never asks, am I going the right way?

It doesn't stand still and worry.

It doesn't look at the rocks in its path and say, oh no, I'm blocked, I've made a mistake.

I should have been more like the river over there.

No.

It just moves.

And when it meets an obstacle, it goes around or under or it waits for 1,000 years if necessary and it goes through.

And the miraculous thing, it always reaches the sea.

Not despite the obstacles, not in spite of the winding and the turning and the temporary pools.

Where it seems to stop entirely because of them.

The winding is how rivers move.

And so are you, you are a winding thing.

You are not a straight line.

And you were never supposed to be.

The culture tells you go directly from point A to point B.

Be efficient.

Don't waste time.

Know where you're going and march there like a soldier.

But that's not how life moves.

That's not how you move.

You move like water.

Like music.

Like a conversation that changes direction 17 times and somehow ends up exactly where it needed to go.

Let me tell you something that happened to me once.

I was walking in the mountains, this was years ago, and I had a map.

A very good map.

And I had planned my route very carefully the night before, as sensible people do.

I would go up this trail, across this ridge down to this lake.

And arrive at a certain hut by evening.

Very orderly, very responsible.

But in the morning there was fog.

Thick white fog that swallowed everything.

And I took a wrong turn almost immediately.

I didn't realize it for an hour.

By the time the fog lifted, I was nowhere on my map.

I was completely lost.

Now the sensible thing would have been to turn back, to retrace my steps and start over.

To get back on the correct path.

But something in me said, keep going.

And I can't explain this to you rationally.

It was not a logical decision.

It was something else.

A feeling that the wrong path was calling me somehow.

So I walked for hours.

I walked through country I had never planned to see.

Through meadows that weren't on any map.

Past a waterfall I would never have found otherwise.

And as the sun began to set, I came over a ridge and there below me was the hut.

The same hut I had been aiming for all along.

I arrived from completely the wrong direction.

By completely the wrong route.

And uh, I remember standing there breathing hard, looking at this little wooden building and laughing.

Because I understood something in that moment.

The map was an idea.

A concept, a picture someone made of the territory.

But I was not walking on a map.

I was walking on the mountain.

And the mountain knew the way even when I didn't.

Especially when I didn't pause.

You see.

We think we're supposed to know.

We think clarity is the goal.

If only I could see the path clearly.

Then I could walk it.

But what if clarity isn't the beginning?

What if clarity only comes at the end?

What if you're supposed to walk in the fog?

And trust that your feet know something your mind doesn't.

This is very difficult for us to accept.

Because we worship the mind, we worship planning and strategy.

And knowing ahead of time.

And there's a place for that.

I'm not saying throw away all your maps.

Maps are useful, but they are not the territory.

You are not walking through a map.

You are walking through your life.

And your life is alive.

It responds, it adjusts.

It catches you when you fall and it falls with you when you need to fall.

And it lifts you up when falling is over.

It's not a mechanism.

It's an organism.

And you are part of it, not separate from it.

Not on top of it trying to control it.

In it.

Of it.

Of it.

So.

When you look back at your life and you see all those moments where you thought you were lost.

You might begin to wonder if lost was ever the right word.

Because a seed underground doesn't know it's becoming a tree.

It experiences only darkness.

Pressure, the terrible weight of soil above.

If the seed could think, it would think it was dying.

It would think something had gone horribly wrong.

I'm supposed to be in the light.

It would say.

Why am I buried?

Why is everything pressing against me?

And yet the pressing is what cracks the shell.

The darkness is where the roots reach down.

The burial is the beginning of rising.

You have been buried many times in your life.

You know exactly what I mean.

Those periods where everything went dark.

Where you couldn't see your hand in front of your face.

Metaphorically speaking.

Where you thought, genuinely thought, that this was the end of something essential in you.

And you were right.

It was the end.

Just the end of the shell.

The end of the casing.

You had outgrown the end of who you were.

So that who you are could emerge.

Hmm, there's a word we don't use correctly.

Destiny.

We think destiny means a fixed point in the future.

That you're walking toward a destination that's already determined.

Like a train on a track heading for a station that's printed on the schedule.

But destiny isn't a place.

Destiny is how you move.

Think about the way you walk.

Really think about it.

When you walk.

You fall forward.

Did you know that?

Walking is controlled falling.

You lean forward, lose your balance and catch yourself with the next step.

Lean.

Fall.

Catch.

Lean.

Fall.

Catch.

Over and over.

That's how you cross a room.

So in a very real way, you are always falling through your life.

Always off balance.

Always catching yourself just in time to throw yourself off balance again.

And this falling.

This eternal almost toppling.

Is the only way to get anywhere.

Children understand this when they learn to walk.

They fall constantly and we celebrate their falling.

Because we know what it means.

We don't say, oh no, the baby fell again.

Something is wrong.

We say, look, she's learning.

When did we stop applying that to ourselves?

When did falling become failure instead of locomotion?

I watch people and I include myself in this, I'm not exempt, I watch people torture themselves over decisions.

Should I do this or should I do that?

What if I choose wrong?

And there's a kind of paralysis that sets in.

A freezing because we're so afraid of falling that we refuse to take the step.

And then we wonder why we're stuck.

You cannot walk without falling forward.

You cannot live without choosing and choosing always means stepping into the unknown.

Always, every single time.

Even the choices that feel safe are just falls in a familiar direction.

There's a lovely thing that happens in music.

A melody, if you listen closely, is always creating tension and then resolving it.

The note wants to go somewhere.

It reaches.

It aches.

It pulls toward the next note.

And when the next note arrives, there's a little release.

A small satisfaction.

But then immediately, immediately, the new note is reaching for the next one.

Music is longing becoming sound.

And you are the same way.

You are always reaching, always in the middle of a phrase that hasn't resolved yet.

And the resolution when it comes will simply begin a new reaching.

This is what it means to be alive.

So the question, am I on the right path, is a bit like a note asking.

Am I in the right melody?

You are the melody.

You don't walk along it as if it were a road.

You are it unfolding.

You are the path taking itself.

Let that land for a moment.

You are the path taking itself.

When I was young, and I mean very young, seven or eight years old.

I used to play a game with myself.

I would close my eyes and walk through the house.

Hands out in front of me, shuffling carefully, trying to make it from my bedroom to the kitchen without peeking.

And I remember the fear.

The delicious fear of not knowing when I would bump into something.

Every step was an adventure.

Every step was a question.

What's next?

What's here?

Will I make it?

Of course.

I knew the house.

I had walked through it 1,000 times with my eyes open.

But with my eyes closed, it became new again.

Alive again.

Interesting again.

Now I didn't realize it then.

But I was teaching myself something.

I was teaching myself that you can move through the unknown.

That blindness doesn't mean you stop walking.

It means you walk differently.

You feel more.

You pay attention more.

You become more sensitive to the subtle signals.

The change in the air, the texture of the floor.

The sounds that tell you where you are.

You develop what we might call blind trust.

And blind trust is the only kind of trust there is.

Really, trust with full vision isn't trust.

It's just calculation.

I can see that this is safe.

So I'll proceed.

That requires no courage.

That requires no faith.

Real trust is stepping forward when you cannot see the ground.

Real trust is letting go when you cannot see the net.

Real trust is saying yes to your life, even when your life is not explaining itself to you.

I think.

I think.

I think we're all walking through a house with our eyes closed and we've forgotten that this is okay.

We keep trying to pry our eyes open.

We keep demanding that life show us the floor plan.

We keep saying, tell me what's going to happen, tell me if this will work out, tell me if I'll be happy, tell me if I'm wasting my time.

And life just keeps saying, walk.

Just walk.

I'll catch you or I'll teach you.

Either way, you'll arrive somewhere.

And that somewhere will become the only somewhere there ever could have been.

Because you will have walked there.

It will be yours.

Carved by your feet, created by your falling.

This is destiny.

You in motion.

Not knowing and arriving anyway.