This is my first blog post in quite some time, and it's not turned out to be at all what I expected as I've thought about and mentally started composing many blogs over the last few weeks. But here it is.
Not everyone will make the same choices in life. In fact, no two people can make entirely identical choices. I'm pretty sure that's not mathematically possible. And how does one make the "right" choice? It becomes complex, because who gets to decide what is "right?" And how can that "right" hold true for all people? It can't.
I make my choices with few apologies. I chose a school in New York City, far from my family, with a non-traditional program and a non-traditional campus. NYU is not the right place for everyone. PHTS, while the only place I could possibly be, is absolutely not the right place for everyone. So what validity is there in judging another's choices?
Lately I have been thinking frequently on choice and free will in relation to destiny and calling. I believe people are called to do things. I believe in God and the Universe having bigger plans than we can see all at once. But I don't think I believe in fate - that something will happen no matter what choices a human being makes. I realized today that the difference between destiny and calling is the element of choosing to follow it. J.K. Rowling says in in Dumbledore's voice in the second Harry Potter book, and she says it again (in many ways) in the fifth, sixth, and seventh books (and probably in the rest as well, if I went back and looked again): "It is our choices, Harry, that show who we truly are, far more than our abilities." The prophecy says "neither can live while the other survives," but Harry has been called to destroy Voldemort, regardless of what the prophecy says, and he chooses to answer the calling and be the end of Voldemort - not because he heard the prophecy say so, but because he always knew he would, and he must.
As I think I have said before, I am called to love. Like Harry, love is my strength, my greatest weapon against the demons in my own head and against all those who underestimate it, though it is perhaps the underestimation of love that can make it so painful to those who feel it so strongly. I was eight years old the first time I read Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets and Dumbledore spoke those wizened words and only thirteen when I read Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix and learned of the prophecy, but here I sit, twenty years old, and more impacted now by the children's story than I think I was when I first read it.
I've read the whole series - particularly the first three books - more times than I can count. I grew up with these kids. Harry was born in Rowling's brain the same year I was born. The first movie, in which the kids were eleven, was released when I was eleven, and the final book, to which I now find such a connection, arrived when I was seventeen, like Harry, Ron, and Hermione. I can remember very little time when I wasn't obsessed with Harry Potter, even before the movies, even before the books were popular in America. My childhood seemed to end when I finished The Deathly Hallows for the first time. But there is always something new to be discovered within Rowling's pages, lessons to be learned, and so I try. I choose, as Harry does, to try and to learn and to love.
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This is how it works: You peer inside yourself. You take the things you like, then try to love the things you took. And then you take that love you made, and stick it into someone else's heart, pumping someone else's blood. And walking arm and arm, you hope it don't get harmed, but even if it does, you'll just do it all again.
Have you ever read Don Miguel Ruiz? He wrote "The Four Agreements" and "The Mastery of Love".
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