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.