What We Call Fate: Making the Unseen Seen
In a world where change is assured and accelerating, it’s terrifying to think we might not have any control. Scarier yet is the question of whether we have any real choices. Do we get to determine where we go next, or do we exist in an endless chain of reactions, shifted one way or another by circumstance? It’s certainly true that so much of what happens to us is out of our hands. A lightning strike can inspire or destroy. Sometimes the people we love get sick. Or we get sick. Over time, politics and technology shift in a million little ways that can build or break entire industries. It’s almost laughable how much is out of our control. (Because, as the old adage goes, if you don’t laugh, you’ll cry.)
But—and this is a major but—I also believe that so much of what we experience as “just what happened” and “just who I am” is not fixed. Think about the last time you reacted in a way that you later regretted. Or maybe you didn’t regret it, but it led to an outcome you weren’t happy with. Try backtracking in your memory to the exact moment you decided to respond that way, whether it was a sharp reply, a cold shoulder, a yes that should have been a no, or a no that should have been a yes. It’s difficult to pinpoint, isn’t it?
What happened in that moment is you took a familiar route, the way your feet find their way through your dark house without any conscious thought. Neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett’s research confirms this, showing that the brain runs largely on prediction, constantly reaching for the most familiar, most efficient response so it doesn’t have to build one from scratch every time. It’s your nervous system carrying you through a reaction before you register there was a choice at all. That is the illusion of unseen patterns.
Control says, “I determine what happens.” Choice says, “I determine how I participate in what happens.” The experience of agency matters even when certainty is impossible. But to find that agency, you need to see the choice in front of you.
Seeing Choice is a Skill You Develop
When we think of choices, we usually picture the big ones: to take the job or turn it down, to stay in a marriage or go, to move away from home or not. With those choices, we feel ourselves standing at a crossroads. But they aren’t the only choices we make. Sometimes the choices that shape our lives most are the ones we’ve stopped recognizing as choices at all. Our days are steered more by those thousand unseen choices than by the decisions we recognize and agonize over.
Seeing these unseen decisions, and building the capacity to actually choose your response, are things you develop. But that can feel a bit empty when your reactions and responses are wired into you in a way that seems concrete and unchangeable, honed through years of nature and nurture, or when you are moving so fast that the moment is over before you ever arrive.
Carl Jung said it this way: “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” And I think that is at the heart of this, because you cannot choose something you cannot see. So real choice begins with the slow, unglamorous work of making the unseen seen.
Signs of an Unseen Choice
The unconscious is, by definition, the part you can’t watch directly. You’ll never catch it head-on, because the moment you turn to look, it’s already behind you. It leaves evidence, though. And once you know where to look and what to notice, that evidence becomes more apparent.
Here are several tells that an unseen choice may be at play.
1. You have a physical reaction.
Before you have the words for a feeling, something happens physically. Your body might tense up or tighten. Maybe your stomach drops or jaw clenches. For some, their breathing goes shallow. There’s the old classic where your shoulders slowly climb up around your ears. Those responses may be your body registering a choice a millisecond before it’s available to you. That little snag, or flicker when you brace yourself or relax is sometimes the only signal you get that a choice has appeared. The key is to become comfortable enough, at home enough in your body that those highly personal signals don’t pass you by.
2. You have a disproportionate emotional response.
Did you experience a flare-up of rage in the face of a minor inconvenience? No judgment; this happens to all of us. Or maybe you felt a wave of intense shame over a simple mistake. Or completely shut down in the face of casual criticism. That disproportionate response is a tell, and it offers two things at once. In the moment, it’s a cue to regulate and steady the system before the old pattern makes the choice for you. But it’s also a clue worth following later: the size of the reaction is probably pointing at something from your past that was never fully resolved. It’s emotional residue! The immediate work is to come back to center. The deeper work, when you’re ready, is to go back and tend to whatever that reaction is still protecting.
3. It keeps happening.
Are you finding yourself in the same situation over and over again? There’s a good chance that it’s part of a pattern—one kind of conflict dressed up in different clothing. It might look like that disproportionate response, like yelling at a loved one, or something less obvious like people pleasing and overpromising. In some cases, it’s something even stickier like finding yourself in the same toxic relationship dynamics. If it’s a pattern, even if it feels like something that is happening to you, somewhere within that pattern might be the tell-tale edges of a decision. Something you can get just your fingers under and pull up to reveal whatever is beneath. It could even be the subtle decision to keep telling yourself the same old story about what you think you deserve.
4. Someone else sees it first.
We’re often the last ones to see the pattern of our own reactions and choices, whereas the people around us have a much clearer view. This is especially true if it’s someone you love and trust, like a friend, a partner, or a respected colleague. If other people keep gently raising a concern, it’s usually for a good reason. When in doubt, reach out and ask those wonderful people for feedback. They could be sitting on a goldmine of valuable observations.
You Can't Choose on an Empty Cup
Learning to listen to your body and regulate your nervous system makes this kind of self-awareness possible, because a depleted, dysregulated system can’t observe itself. It’s too busy bracing to notice a subtle choice, so it just reacts blindly. And while reacting isn’t inherently a bad thing—after all, it sometimes protects us from dangerous situations—it can become a form of autopilot. If you run yourself empty and operate on autopilot alone, you lose the very thing we’re all after: the autonomy to respond deliberately and as yourself (instead of as your conditioning).
At first, you may be able to recognize the moment of decision in hindsight only. With practice, you’ll start to see it sooner. The lag between your reaction and your awareness of the choice will keep shrinking, until one day you spot the decision as it appears. Sometimes you’ll still choose the familiar path, but the difference is that it will finally be a real choice, a real conscious response, instead of a reflex. And what an enormous feat that will be. Some people live their entire lives without learning how to recognize moments of choice for what they are.
I’ve thought a lot about what freedom means to me. After much reflection, I think it is this: the ability to participate consciously in a life that is ever-changing at its core. We may not control our circumstances, or be able to avoid grief, uncertainty, or conflict, but we can become the kind of people who recognize the invisible decisions shaping our lives. That is the kind of leadership that flourishes in an ever-more-rapidly changing world, and how we get closer to leading lives of real meaning.
