Life is Fate and Chance Is Choice
Joseph Campbell called it the hand of a supreme author — the sense, looking back, that a life's chance meetings were written for us. JB Minton's argument here is more exacting than that: fate is the door appearing, and choice is which of us walks through it, one decision compounding into the next until it looks, in hindsight, like destiny. The proof text is R.E.M. drummer Bill Berry, felled onstage in Switzerland by a brain aneurysm in 1995 and saved by a hospital two miles away that happened to hold the one surgeon on earth built for that exact injury — fate, and then, choice after choice, survival.
Fill Up Your Wheelbarrow!
The wheelbarrow is your life, the pebbles are everything the world throws at you, and the hill doesn't get gentler because you're tired. JB Minton's parable is blunt about what happens if you never stop to empty the barrow — it's not metaphorical exhaustion, it's the depression, the addiction, the divorce, the disease that pressure left unmanaged actually produces. His prescription is equally blunt: meditate twenty minutes, twice a day, on purpose, or keep pushing uphill until you tip.