You gotta have fate: Charles Assisi on the invisible hand that shapes our lives

A chance meeting alters our fate; happenstance secures us a win. How do we contend with the surreality of having forces at work that are beyond our reach?

It is tempting to believe that most of what I’ve accomplished is the outcome of hard work: Showing up. Staying at it. Paying attention when others drifted. Making choices that were often inconvenient and exhausting.

Manoj Bajpayee as the angel Dev works on his wings, in the film Jugnuma (2024).

It is tempting, isn’t it, to think of it in terms of cause and effect, effort and outcome.

That is a story we can tell with pride. The trouble is, it has never felt sufficient.

This occurred to me most recently on a drive through Kochi. A private bus swerved with a rashness common among buses here. I hit the brakes; we didn’t collide. We kept going. But the near-miss lingered in the cabin. My cousin was in the passenger seat. We grew up together: two atheists who have watched each other rise and fail quietly over the years.

In the silence after the near-miss with the bus, she wondered aloud how much of our good fortune could be credited to the right decisions alone. How often did the thing work out not just because we planned it well, but because nothing got in our way? How often had a chance meeting altered out fates? Even our bodies and minds held up, in ways so many others did not.

Coming from her, the question landed differently. This wasn’t faith speaking. Or resignation. It was reason noticing its limits.

While I am comfortable attributing progress to discipline and choice, I am less comfortable acknowledging how much depends on timing, health, other people’s generosity, and sheer chance. When pressed, I have called it luck. Or probability resolving itself favourably. Those are respectable words. They don’t demand belief.

And yet, sitting across from someone who shared my disbelief, I realised those admissions didn’t quite capture the ambivalence.

You see, the unsettling part isn’t that grace might exist. It’s that it might be arbitrary.

That is a deeply unsettling thought, for someone who likes to believe the world and everything in it is moulded by science, systems and, yes, the vagaries of genetics and biology.

Once the question of grace was raised, I couldn’t set it aside. If cause and effect were not the whole story, what exactly had been carrying me, through the years? And what might the result be if it dwindled, or decided to stop?

We label it “uncertainty”, this dread that sits quietly alongside success.

It appears when a certain amount of stability has been achieved. When one has enough distance from the struggle to pause, and consider how uncertain the path really was.

Over time, I’ve noticed how differently people respond to this realisation. Some double down and mythologise their story. Others turn superstitious, seeking in rituals an antidote to randomness. Some retreat into cynicism, others into performative gratitude.

What is a good way to contend with this unknown? Perhaps it is to neither worship it nor deny it, but to behave well in its presence.

Work as if effort matters, while knowing it isn’t everything. Prepare, train, show up. Treat people well, not because “the universe” is watching, but because you are. Avoid cruelty, not from fear of consequence, but because cruelty compounds randomness in the worst ways.

I generally enter a new year with resolutions. This time, I aim to start with less certainty, more attentiveness, less entitlement and more care. Recognising that progress is, at least in part, a gift.

There is something oddly liberating about this. If our success isn’t all our own, then arrogance makes no sense. And all we may judge ourselves and each other on is conduct.

What of the great, gaping void it presents, of the unknown and unknowable?

The idea that our lives are shaped by forces beyond our reach needn’t make one anxious. It can instead make one careful. I like to think I have the caution of a man who knows he is a good driver, but who also knows that the road is an uncertain thing.

We are here now, unscathed. And that is enough.

(Charles Assisi is co-founder of Founding Fuel. He can be reached on assisi@foundingfuel.com. The views expressed are personal)