Two
quotes came together and
clicked for me today:
"We meet ourselves time and again in a thousand disguises on the path of life"
~~
Carl Jung
"We often meet our destiny on the path we take to avoid it"
~~
Jean de La Fontaine
My appreciation of Jung shot up a full notch when I learned of the quote of his. Both are resonant
truths. And both, it turns out, can be true at the same time: It doesn't matter which
path you take. You will meet yourself in a thousand disguises. Because that is your
destiny.
And this further brought to my mind, oddly enough, a scene from the movie
Rango, wherein the
Spirit of the
West (voiced by
Timothy Olyphant,
channeling Clint Eastwood about as hard as can be done) tells the main character (a
chameleon voiced by
Johnny Depp): "No man can walk out on his own story." Unbelieving, Rango asks his nearby
armadillo friend (voiced by
Alfred Molina) if he too saw the spirit; the armadillo responds: "We each see what we need to see."
This pair of quotes corresponds (in my mind at least) to those classical quotes. Trying to walk out on one's own
story seems to be simply another sort of path taken to avoid one's destiny--and so, simply another step along that road to meeting it. And when we encounter our disguised other selves, we may indeed see what we need to see in the
moment in which we see ourselves in them, and we see what we need to see when we manage to see everything
but ourselves in them.
And so, so long as we are on paths to meet our destiny on our way to avoid it, and so long as we may rend the disguises from our other selves, we will indeed meet ourselves time and again in a thousand disguises on the path we took to avoid the tangled
web we weave which is our destiny.