“If this be my destiny …” said the old man who hijacked my body, as I stood after spending most of the last three and a half hours in the same easy chair. I needed to pause and get my sea legs before I walked to the kitchen to plug in my laptop and pick up my journal. I’m 211 pages into my 30th journal since I got serious about journaling 10-plus years ago, this one 240 pages for me to apply ink to paper.
“If This Be My Destiny” is the title of a comic book story from my childhood. Maybe I’ll look up which comic book story a little later. For now it’s a launching point.
If this be my destiny, I guess it’s a pretty good one. God bless the broken road that led me straight to this place, a comfortable house in the country filled with memorabilia from two lifetimes, mine and the precious soul who built it with my assistance, whose ashes still patiently wait on a shelf for their final resting place. It’s not a large house, but perhaps a little bigger than one person can handle by himself, or perhaps I haven’t been trying hard enough. Again, if this be my destiny, I really have no cause to complain.
If anything has fallen short of expectations, I would say it was me. Much is expected of he to whom much has been given, and I ought to have made more of my life than I would have expected. I am not thoroughly disappointed in myself, but that’s partially because it appears I still have some time to fulfill those expectations — although no one knows the number of his days, so I really ought to keep working on that.
I’m not saying this in hopes someone will say, “Nonsense, you have done thus and so.” It’s just an honest assessment of what I’ve done with the gifts God gave me. I dare say most of us might say the same thing if asked to give an honest assessment.
The appeal of the “It’s a Wonderful Life” story is that George Bailey is Every Man. I think every person has had moments where we think, “I wonder if anything I’ve done has ever made any difference in anyone’s life. Would anything be substantially changed in anyone’s life if I hadn’t been there?”
If we examine that question — as George must in his story — of course the world would be different, and substantially less than it is, if any of us had not been here to lessen other people’s burdens, to brighten other people’s lives, or to love the other people we love.
It’s a wonderful life that we share with one another. That’s why we mourn whenever any of those other people departs this mortal plane, which is in fact our destiny in the end.
I have not done everything one might say I was destined to do, and I have not been all one might say I was put on this earth to be. That’s why I am grateful to apparently have a ways to go on this journey — although, if something unexpected happens and I’m gone tomorrow, I really must thank God for this most amazing life.
(P.S. Of course. “If This Be My Destiny” is the title of the story in Amazing Spider-Man #31 that continues in issues 32 and 33 and cumulatively marks the high point in writer-artist Steve Ditko’s work on his character. If I’m going to wax philosophically over the title of a comic book story, let it be that one.)
