“Fate Will Take What Fate Will Have”- William Somerset Maugham

(Image source- https://www.wired.com/story/giving-open-source-projects-life-after-a-developers-death/)

June 6, 2019

People say there are only two finite things in this World- however, I believe there’s only one … DEATH.  Many of you may not agree but I do believe DEATH is the only certainty in the whole world.  Everything else is your destiny … and what you make of your life.

William Somerset Maugham’s last play, “Sheppey”, tells the story of Sheppey, an hairdresser, who believes he is a lucky man.  Maugham ends the play with an old Arabic Fable, where “DEATH” visits Sheppey; and in reply to Sheppey, tells the story of a merchant in Baghdad trying to escape death (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheppey_(play)).  Jeffrey Archer’s very first chapter, titled “Death Speaks” in his book “To Cut a Long Story Short”, requotes this very Fable.

Whatever our life and however good or evil we’ve lived it, in the end we just cannot escape the ONE certainty life has in store for us – our own DEATH.

We may be terminally sick, a building may fall on us, die in a war or an earthquake swallows us – nothing is by accident.  This was our fate, with the time and place written. 

The only measure of comfort we may be able to get out of this certainty is how we die – the more violent, harder or painful may very well be a factor of how we lived our life.

So next time someone “good” dies – whether at a young or old age – I will try not to blame the so-called “cause” of the death or go in for a “blame game”; but look introspectively and try to reconcile that the person’s time had arrived.  Don’t blame yourself, nor the opposite person, nor the circumstances surrounding his death – this was meant to happen, at the time it happened and in the place it happened. 

That’s all there is to it!