To the Fatefull Ones
Between a speech and a story meant for a good attention span
I have been here before.
I recognise this building. There is no one in the gateway, just as then, once again. From the ceiling, fluorescent tubes spill a brutal cone of light; the stairs are slippery.
I recognise the smell of your apartment, and once again I have the impression that, shortly before my arrival, a thunderbolt heralding a storm struck the building; that biting, dry, slightly sweet air, saturated with the smell of burning, is impossible to forget. It might be the smell of the coffee the neighbour is roasting, traditionally, always around this time, as you explain. The Ethiopian lady, as it sounds from your description. Ethiopian? Eritrean? Somalian? I am pretty sure—Somalian—but it doesn’t matter. The lady matters, her coffee matters, but the geography… It would be ignorant, really to give it a very specific nationality. Although so many countries proudly guard coffee as a neat national product; it simply didn’t begin that way. Long before borders, coffee travelled with people across the Horn of Africa. Traders, nomads, and sailors were moving between the Ethiopian highlands, the Red Sea, Yemen, Eritrea, and the Swahili Coast. Somali coffee culture grew on the road. The Horn of Africa has always been one cultural basin, not separate countries, where the Red Sea functioned as a bridge, not a border. ‘Somali’ traders historically supplied coffee to Eritrea, Yemen, Sudan and Egypt, even the Indian Ocean world, including Oman.
And… Besides coffee, I remember you.
I have seen your gaze before; once I saw you sitting in the painful glow of the lights, attentively staring ahead, immersed in the scent of the storm, waiting for me to speak.
When I appeared here for the first time, it was the same.
You were sitting and listening in exactly the same way, from exactly the same distance as now, surveying everything around you with an incredible intensity, focused and motionless. And although a great deal of time has passed since that day, not even what made our first meeting so exceptional has changed—because just as then I did not know who you were, so I do not know it today, when we meet again, and I am once again standing to talk. And since I cannot explain what you expect of me, I would at least like to understand why I have come here again—why I, your helpless chosen one, for unknown reasons, have been invited here.
And so we find ourselves at the same point as before: I had no intention whatsoever of accepting the invitation, and yet I am here. Over the phone, I said, fine, we’ll see—please call again later today and we’ll discuss the details, though all the while I was thinking there was no question of it. What was there to imagine? One should surely have dreamt enough to satisfy their qualms. And then that second invitation would not leave me in peace any more than the first. The thought would not let go of me—you know perfectly well what I do, that I am not an expert in more than one, two, possibly three, fields, that I know nothing that might be of interest to those modern others; on top of that I have poor diction, I swallow word endings or add some unnecessarily—so what is all this for, I wondered.
And I kept asking myself further questions: for example, what kind of collaboration is this? And for what reason do they want it to be me, and now again, the choice falls on me. And in general: what sense does it make?
I could go on endlessly, but I won’t. I believe everything points to the fact that matters are still exactly as they were the first time: I said something, not really knowing to whom I was speaking, and you listened; no-one applauded; finally, in silence, without speaking to one another, you dispersed through the building, and I went out and set off ahead of me, followed by an entire retinue of escorts whom I was in no way able to dissuade from their intention—“to ensure my safety,” and escort me home.
What did I say then? For those who weren’t witnesses that time, I will repeat in short what I said:
Faulty ventral anchors?!
You asked me So what makes an anchor faulty?
Something that once felt regulating but no longer truly brings safety, or never really did. This happens in a relationship where you only feel okay if the other person is present. That could be a therapist, teacher, or authority figure who “knows what’s good for you”.
So you look for ventral anchors, knowingly, more often instinctively. They are nothing more than objects, symbols, things, places, people, relationships, words, sentences, fragments of art, animals, environments, and places in nature that promote a space of regulation. You look for your own.
My autonomic nervous system will not tell you what is safe for you. No therapist will tell you that either. They can suggest—but you are the one who checks, more precisely: Your nervous system checks. And it is your nervous system that answers with stability, with contact, a sense of safety, calm, curiosity…
Then you say, that the key is understanding. And I continue: Understanding does not change the nervous system. The experience of safety does, quoting Bessel van der Kolk. Because if understanding alone were enough, then books would heal trauma, films would change childhood, and podcasts would repair relationships. You can know everything. You can understand where it came from. You can name it beautifully. And the nervous system… still responds with fear, tension, freezing.
Techniques are tools, and who other than me wouldn’t appreciate books, films and podcasts…? What truly works is a safe space that slowly forms, a space where one can speak without being judged, where emotions do not destroy relationships, where there is no need to rush, where someone stays, even when things become difficult.
Everything remained as before—yes, with one single exception: this time I wasn’t left a free choice, of which I will speak, but I was asked to tell in what kind of world I would like to live.
In what kind of world would I like to live in?!
Usually, it is indifferent to me what I am asked or questioned about; my answers always respond to requests or questions that were never actually voiced. Now, however, quickly—indeed immediately, as soon as I put down my phone—I realised there would be no such need. I understood that, contrary to appearances, you did not take such an approach to the topic seriously; I understood that such a long-unheard-of yet all the more heart-gripping request did not limit me in any way—on the contrary, in the deepest sense of the word, my hands were completely free. I could decide for myself what I wanted to speak about, and you merely wished to make it clear that you are interested in the world—and, if I understood correctly, in what it ought to be like.
I do not deny that after our phone conversation I spent some time (I’m too shy to say how long exactly) wondering whether this surprisingly naïve—one might say childishly simple—question did not mean that, for some reason unknown to me, you feel able to say: fine, the world was such and such, but what should it be now?
Yes, that even occurred to me, though later I pushed the thought aside, because after all, confronted with your severe, unmoving, and almost terrifyingly disciplined attention, I had no reason to think I had found myself among dreamers—still less that I would need to make you aware that, in the state the world finds itself in today, dreaming is something unbearable and completely idiotic (I am trying to sound credible, repeating after some) and one should measure a good amount of caffeine to awaken, to check where they were late to…
And so that is a false trail, I concluded, abandoning the attempt to unravel the actual content of the topic set before me, and—no small part carried along by the waves stirred in me by that unexplained, real content of the proposed subject—I asked myself what would happen if, contrary to my original intention, I were to come here again; and if I were to come again, looking straight ahead, as the situation required, with a deeply pensive expression, what would be the thing I could speak about. Overworking to feel “useful”? Perfectionism masquerading as stability? Spiritual bypassing? Numbing routines, doom-scrolling, dissociation disguised as rest?
Literally, what to talk about…?
Perhaps about love? I wondered. Love is sometimes nothing more than staying one step behind, careful not to disturb the world of the other, comes straight to my mind (from The Museum of Innocence). But then I think—subject covered to excess—why would I take the first one from the priority list?
Or maybe better about death! It gets us all, after all.
I sat racking my brain—no longer looking out the window (repeating: love?), but straight ahead (repeating: death?), still with a thoughtful expression, as the situation required.
It would be best, I decided, rising from the chair, if I spoke about fate—about why what is, is so utterly unbearable. I sat back down on the bed, this time with the final resolution that this, then, is what I would speak about. After all, I went to latin classes, and I know that fated comes from the Latin fatum, meaning:
that which has been spoken
It derives from fari — to speak, to utter. So if originally fate is not about destiny in the romantic sense, but about something said into existence, I definitely want to declare that. And I promise, there will be no liberty of the United States, I wil not turn myself into a statue, I won’t even rhyme it either (I declare myself free from the sentences spoken over me).
Before I begin my honest declaration, however, I have a request.
I saw how that man… closed the door to the hall. I don’t like to speak with the door entirely shut, not with them open so wide that the outside conversations disturb my voice. Let’s keep them neither open nor closed— halfway, so to say. I will speak all the way, but the door should be positioned halfway, that’s all.
And now to the point.
The question is as follows: Can one say anything about fate, dear listeners? Such doesn’t exist, except…
So please, listen to this!
“For young men, and women, too, what makes you different or weird, that’s your strength,” Meryl Streep told graduates. Obviously, I am not talking to any graduates, students at their best; it’s not a speech, and there are no professors in the room.
I had never truly understood that strange word weird — or, for that matter, being not especially ordinary with some offbeat interests, nor causing a stir, nothing of a Marilyn Monroe’s personality. Considered “strange,” enigmatic, or uniquely captivating because embodying a complex paradox: a careful, hyper-romanticised public persona that contrasted sharply with her shy, intellectual, and deeply vulnerable private self (Norma Jeane).
Today, weird might mean, in your reception, something odd, uncanny, unsettling, not quite right; mildly strange at best, faintly disturbing at worst. But that’s the watered-down version. Isn’t?
Let me tell you then that weird comes from Old English wyrd (which did not mean strange at all), essentially meaning “fate” or destiny, what happens to you whether you like it or not. Medieval Scots writers even referred to the “weird sisters” as the goddesses of fate, and Shakespeare simply adopted that term for Macbeth’s three witches. In other words, the word literally named the Fates. Even Norse mythology carries this root — one of the Norns who weave human destiny is named Urðr (Old Norse wyrd). Only by the 1800s did weird weaken into its modern sense of strange or eerie.
In short, what you might take upon as a quirky “insult”, or lighter: euphemism for awkward outsider, was originally a word for destiny and supernatural power. Many modern writers call it “emancipatory,” saying it “liberates us from being defined by … others and helps us ‘subvert expectation’. On t-shirts, weird is being married with “limited edition”, which itself originated in the publishing industry during the Victorian era to describe books printed in small, high-quality batches to justify a premium price.
When some people say something is weird, they often mean: it doesn’t fit the pattern, it disrupts the expected order… As if reality were ever to be fully under control.
A fateful person is then someone who alters the course of your life, even slightly, arrives at a decisive moment (with a speech or not), or becomes a hinge between who you were and who you become. Often, you only recognise them after they’ve changed something. So, no. Not strange, not awkward, not misplaced — but consequential.
She was a fateful presence in his life, though at the time he mistook her for a passing acquaintance.
History remembers the decision, but it was the fateful person behind it who shifted the era.
Aren’t people meant not to fulfil or fit the pattern, but to bend it? That’s the adventure, the question at stake. Not one, but one of many.
La grande aventure de l’existence, c’est de trouver là où l’on est bien.
—Sylvain Tesson
This standalone aphorism that will reach you one day, if it hasn’t yet, could be translated: The great adventure of existence is to find where one feels at home. Home—romanticised, isn’t? We all rent, build, create homes, always much better each time we try—we had various homes, and not everyone longs to go back there, yes, on a sunny day, but not every day, that wouldn’t be aimed. The great adventure of life is discovering where you belong? Yes, where you belong …where life finally makes sense? We all know there is no such literal place. Belonging is created, not found, sense, meaning: it is life itself. Maybe the most faithful (not fatefull) translation would be: The great adventure of existence is finding the place where you are well.
Yes, well, the best you could be in your current circumstances. And they might change. You might change them. That might be yours, and certainly is my will, not because the current ones are terrible but because wellness changes its shape. It discards its methods the way the body renews its cells. To persist with yesterday’s remedies is mere sentimentality. Care, like truth, endures only insofar as it can revise itself.
If you do like one-liners (not eyeliner, ladies! — The most beautiful makeup a woman can wear is passion. Cosmetics are simply easier to buy, as Yves Saint Laurent put it), you might still read from the wisest men in history. Yes. Not only didn’t they waste time on make-up, but encapsulated wisdom into quotes that we treat as pills. Steve Jobs, together with other tech gurus, would create empires so that the grey mass could scroll while they would read the ancient philosophers and I mean, read them, not just taking the pills. Always worth asking what is worthy to be.
So now, after dropping some less lengthy pills and specialised reads that might be of your interest (might not, but worth checking?), as a prelude to the second part of my discourse, I will tell, loud and clear, a poem entitled Will from ‘Poems of Passion’ by Ella Wheeler Wilcox.
Will
There is no chance, no destiny, no fate,
Can circumvent or hinder or control
The firm resolve of a determined soul.
Gifts count for nothing; will alone is great;
All things give way before it, soon or late.
What obstacle can stay the mighty force
Of the sea-seeking river in its course,
Or cause the ascending orb of day to wait?
Each well-born soul must win what it deserves.
Let the fool prate of luck. The fortunate
Is he whose earnest purpose never swerves,
Whose slightest action or inaction serve.
The one great aim.
Why, even Death stands still,
And waits an hour sometimes for such a will.
I could end there. How many people are still reading this, so many ideas about love, death, fate, health, even free will, and more conversely, balanced tech dose and face image, their own and the one of their dear ones. Think of the difference in understanding the concepts of hospitality and captivity, and how much we differ in assessing the situation, how much various things occupy us in the matter of the “common cause”, which is sadly losing its importance, though I would prefer to think not.
You’re certainly surprised that I’m not trying to cleverly conceal it, but rather openly admit it: in my case, it’s a trifle. It’s extraordinary, even, I think, ridiculous, because, well, it would be quite understandable if you shouted now, dear artist, you could dust off this brief thought before presenting it, because it’s an old, please forgive me, old story, in short, dusty, yes; to be disappointed in human intelligence, well, okay, maybe not all of humanity at once.
What am I supposed to do? Because that’s the order of things, after earlier experiences and the terrible wounds they inflicted, the human spirit, rising above and resigning from mortal life, grows tired of a world mired in boredom and hopelessness, flies above it, and finally abandons it, calling the secret, unrecognised, mysterious greatness of the object of its spiritual choices.
Most people’s attention is constantly focused on themselves, and as a subject, they remain prisoners of their own safety. They are not interested in the universe, but in their (hopefully special) place in it, not in the God of the universe, but in the chance of becoming the chosen one. In short, the object becomes a sacred yet painfully impossible task, while the worthy existence, the importance of attention—however scattered—continues to exist and always will.
Today marks exactly two years sinced I started to write on Substack. So today, on the 6th of February, by writing, I do not promote celebration of the International Day of Zero Tolerance for Female Genital Mutilation or the Frozen Yogurt Day, as the Internet might suggest, but of one’s voice and unrepeatable life, share of humanity and attention, so rare—so to be highly appreciated. (The reason why I promote getting the Substack App is straighforward and simple: so the ones who choose to listen while commuting can do so.)
Sources:
10 MERYL STREEP SAYINGS THAT WILL GET YOU THROUGH THE SUMMER — Rooftop Cinema Club
Word of the Day: Weird | Merriam-Webster
Weird — Etymology, Origin & Meaning
Defining and emancipating weirdness: A reflection for Weird Pride — Emergent Divergence
To celebrate my two years of writing here, let me drop two reads from Medium:
“‘Weird’ comes from Old English wyrd” made me blink. I’m over here re-hearing every time someone tossed that word like a little shove. Now it feels heavier, and kind of cooler, and I’m not done chewing it.