Life is Fate and Chance Is Choice

What forces come together to create the dramas and details of our lives?

Joseph Campbell sat down with Bill Moyers shortly before Campbell died in a famous series of conversations that became the legendary PBS program The Power of Myth. Campbell spoke about a life spent studying the world's mythologies and highlighting their commonalities across time and cultures. And one of the hundreds of gems of wisdom Campbell shared in that 6-hour series was that at the end of our lives, we have the opportunity to look back on all the events that composed the story of who we were and who we became; there are moments where it feels the hand of a supreme author was writing our lives in the language of fate. Chance meetings and strange coincidences opened up opportunities like they were written directly for each of us. Some of us walk through those doors, and others never do. Life is Fate, and Chance is Choice means that we don’t have control over fate, but we make choices that feel like chance, but are only the next step in a series of choices.

One of the benefits I gained from my use of psychedelics in my early 20s was the zoomed-out point of view of my life as a series of choices with impacts. I became someone who could start looking at my life objectively in terms of my behavioral decisions. It turns out that the helpless feeling I had over my life at the time was frustration with my choices. I needed to start making better choices for myself and my future.

I want to conclude this meditation with an anecdote about Fate and Choice, as told in the true story of what happened to the band R.E.M. during their most successful tour.

At the end of February 1995, R.E.M. ran the world, and their Monster Tour was one of the most significant commercial rock events that had happened to that point. It was indeed a Monster. The previous October, the band released their third multi-platinum album. After six years of not touring from these records, they were conquering the world, somehow finding a balance between sellout rock stars making millions and an independent band creating incredible art. In 1995, R.E.M. was music at every scale.

But onstage in LOH-ZAHN, Switzerland, in late February 1995, there was an explosion, and it wasn’t stagecraft synchronized to the music. The Drummer, Bill Barry, suffered a brain aneurysm on stage. In Peter Ames Carlin’s book The Name Of This Band Is R.E.M., Bill describes there was a “throbbing in the head” followed by “a lightning bolt of pain.” After the song ended, Bill stumbled around and collapsed a couple of times, the final one into the guitarist Peter Buck’s arms. Bill was fucked up.

Whether it was fate or chance that brought R.E.M. together didn’t matter in that moment. These men began as children, implanted in Georgia of the American South in the 1970s. Each of their families moved to Georgia for different reasons, but forces drew them together to Athens, Georgia, in 1980, where choices were made that led to them being on this stage and dealing with one of their bandmates dying.

However, fate revealed itself when Bill Barry’s wife called her friend back in the United States. She was a nurse and had seen some shit. Her good friend told her, with the coldness of a medical professional, “He is not going to survive.” She went on to explain that after an aneurysm burst in the human brain, the damage was not only incalculable, it was irrecoverable.

But fate had something else in store for these weirdo artists. The venue that R.E.M. played at that night just happened to less than two miles away from the only hospital in the world that staffed the best neurosurgeons in the world at that time, one of whom created the exact vascular clipping medical device and procedural technique to save the precise type of injury that Bill Barry had just endured on stage in front of tens of thousands of people.

When they opened his head, Bill Barry was suffering three independent bleeding areas, each of which had to be clipped, and a brand new technique that pushed a balloon up the carotid artery, which held the vessels open until they could heal and not suffer another collapse.

Life is Fate, and Chance is Choice.