Life Sentence

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“For the New Year . . . everyone takes the liberty of expressing his wish and his favorite thought: well, I also mean to tell what I have wished for myself today, and what thought first crossed my mind this year,—a thought which ought to be the basis, the pledge and the sweetening of all my future life! I want more and more to perceive the necessary characters in things as the beautiful:—I shall thus be one of those who beautify things. Amor fati: let that henceforth be my love! I do not want to wage war with the ugly. I do not want to accuse, I do not want even to accuse the accusers. Looking aside, let that be my sole negation! And all in all, to sum up: I wish to be at any time hereafter only a yea-sayer!” (Friedrich Nietzsche 1844-1900)

"Amor Fati" is to love your fate, to say "yes" to life. This does not mean to be a "yes man" to everything that comes along and never say "no" to anything. The idea is that one takes what comes as formative to life.  

“You can’t cry it away or eat it away or starve it away or walk it away or punch it away or even therapy it away. It’s just there, and you have to survive it. You have to endure it. You have to live through it and love it and move on and be better for it.” (Cheryl Strayed, in the Daily Stoic)

One suggests that Amor Fati is the opposite of "memento mori," (the contemplation of your own death). Another may say that one is a response to the other. Death is not a life sentence to be feared. Rather, life is a life sentence to be enjoyed, embraced. All of it. The good and the bad. The days of light as well as the days of darkness. The things you understand and the things you don't. Amor Fati does not pass judgment but says, "that's life." 

“A blazing fire makes flame and brightness out of everything that is thrown into it.” (Marcus Aurelius)

“Do not seek for things to happen the way you want them to; rather, wish that what happens happen the way it happens: then you will be happy.” (Epictetus)

"Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing." (James 1:2-4)

So Amor Fati in 2019.

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