Discovering Destiny

Train Car with Graffiti

I've been reading Joseph and His Brothers by Mann. I'm not quite half way through, and Joseph has started his life as a slave in the house of Potiphar.  Joseph is an attractive character for me, aware of his place in the great symbolic web of life, aware of his life as a repetition of the life of his fathers, patient and clever— although to this point he's lived mostly in potentiality, watching and learning.

Destiny is not only a question for the young, but remains a concern throughout life, and there are few things more frustrating than being at an impasse in front of one's destiny, to feel one's path blocked by an insurmountable obstacle. At moments like this, I would like to someone to come along and shove me in the right direction… As I was reading another book, however, I read the following passage:

"If I were forced to reach my destiny, I would not be able to be happy. It would be neither my happiness, nor my destiny. It is through my freedom that destiny, the end, the goal, the ultimate object becomes an answer given to me. Human fulfillment would not be human — would not be fulfillment— if it were not free. Now, if reaching destiny, fulfillment, is to be free, freedom must 'play a role' even in its discovery" (The Religious Sense, 121). 

I don't make my destiny (I don't make myself so how could I?), but neither is my destiny handed to me like a to do list (as in certain movies which end up as grand failures). A bit further on, there's another tantalizing passage:

"An education that forms attentiveness and acceptance, marked by a sensitivity towards all the factors in play, teaches one to open doors, perhaps already prematurely closed, even if for a perfectly good reason: for at any hour whatsoever, even at night, the substance of reality might knock at the door" (126). 

And so I'll break off here with Joseph as he begins his service to Potiphar:

"Seven rounds of the year— an imitation and repetition of a father's years in the life of his son, corresponding to the period of the period of time in which Jacob had gone from a fugitive and beggar to man weighed down with riches, Laban's indispensable partner in an enterprise bursting with prosperity from the power of his blessing. Now it was Joseph's turn to make himself indispensable— how did that happen, and what did he do? Did he find water as Jacob had? That was totally unnecessary. There was water in abundance on [Potiphar's] estate, for not only was there a lotus pond in the pleasure garden, but square basins had been dug among the plants in the orchard and vegetable garden, and though these were not connected to the Great Provider they still nourished the gardens, for the were filled to the brim with groundwater. […] it was at any rate overflowing with material prosperity that that it would have been difficult, if not superfluous, to be its 'increaser.'" (676).