Actual Acceptance

     It is all of a piece — the look in the eye, the posture, the stance, the gait, and “the angle of vision,” as Balzac says. The angel in man is ready to emerge whenever that dread human will to have one’s own way can be kept in abeyance. Things not only look different, they are different, when perfect sight is restored. To see things whole is to be whole. The fellow who is out to burn things up is the counterpart of the fool who thinks he can save the world. The world needs neither to be burned up nor to be saved. The world is, we are. Transients, if we buck it; here to stay, if we accept it. Nothing is solid, fixed or unalterable. All is flux, because everything created is also creative. If you are unhappy — “and I know you are — take thought! You can spend the rest of your life fighting it out on every front, in every vector — and get nowhere. Give up, throw in the sponge, and possibly you will look at the world with new eyes. More than possibly you will see your friends and enemies in a new light — even your wife, or that rascally, inconsiderate, hardheaded, ill-tempered, gin-soaked devil of a husband.
     Is there a discrepancy between this realistic picture, which I painted when the “oranges” were in bloom? No doubt there is. Have I contradicted myself? No! Both pictures are true, even though colored by the temperament of the writer. We are always in two worlds at once, and neither of them is the world of reality. One is the world we think we are in, the other is the world we would like to be in. Now and then, as if through a chink in the door — or like the myopic who falls asleep in the train — we get a glimpse of the abiding world. When we do, we know better than any metaphysician can expostulate, the difference between true and false, the real and the illusory.
— Henry Miller, Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch, p. 144.

A coincidence? Possibly. I prefer to think otherwise.
     At some point in his life most everyone ponders over the meaning of the word “coincidence.” If we face the question courageously, for it is a disturbing one, we are forced to admit that mere happenstance is no answer. If we use the word “predestination” we feel defeated. And rightly so. It is only because man is born free that these mysterious conjunctions of time, place and event can take place. In the horoscopes of those men and women marked by destiny we observe that mere “incidents” become highly significant events. Perhaps because these individuals were able to realize more of their potential being than ordinary mortals, the correlation between inner and outer, micro and macro, is striking and diamond clear.
     In grappling with the mystery of “chance” we may be unable to render suitable explanation but we cannot deny that we are made aware of laws beyond the reach of human understanding. The more aware we become the more we perceive that there is a relation between right living and good fortune. If we probe deep enough we come to realize that fortune is neither good nor bad, that what matters is the way we take our (good or bad) fortune. The common saying runs: “To make the most of one’s lot.” Implicit in this adage is the idea that we are not equally favored or disfavored by the gods.
     The point I wish to stress is that in accepting our fate we are not to think that things were destined thus or that we were singled out for special attention, but that by responding to the best in ourselves we may put ourselves in rhythm with higher laws, the inscrutable laws of the universe, which have nothing to do with good or bad, you and me.
     This was the test which the great Jehovah put to Job.
     I could run on indefinitely with examples of these coincidences and “miracles,” as I freely call them, which crop up in my life. Numbers, however, mean nothing. If only one had occurred, it would have the same shocking validity. Indeed, what baffles me more than almost anything, in human affairs, is man’s ability to ignore or bypass events or happenings which do not fit into his pattern of thought, his unquestioned logic. In this respect civilized man is just as primitive in his reactions as the so-called savage. What he cannot account for he refuses to look squarely in the face. He dodges the issue by employing words like accident, anomaly, fortuitous, coincidence, and so on.
     But each time “it” happens he is shaken. Man is not at home in the universe, despite all the efforts of philosophers and metaphysicians to provide a soothing syrup. Thought is still a narcotic. The deepest question is Why. And it is a forbidden one. The very asking is in the nature of cosmic sabotage. And the penalty is — the afflictions of Job.
     Every day of our lives we are presented with evidences of the vast, most complicated interconnection between the events which govern our lives and the forces which rule the universe. Our fear in pursuing the flashes of insight which they provoke is that we may come to know what will “happen” to us. The one thing we are given to know from birth is that we will die. But even this we find hard to accept, certain though it be.
— Henry Miller, Ibid., pp. 226-227.