Amor Fati: The Formula for Human Greatness
Live through it and love it and move on and be better for it.
“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
The first time I watched a patient receive a terminal diagnosis, I was 26 and unsure what I was supposed to do with my face.
My attending explained the findings. The patient listened without interrupting. I expected questions about treatment, time, pain, or whether the results could be wrong. Instead, he asked whether he would still have enough strength to finish a deck he was building for his granddaughter.
I remember the question because it seemed so ordinary. His life had just changed, yet his mind had gone to a piece of unfinished work and the person he was building it for.
For years, I interpreted his response as acceptance. But I’m no longer sure that word is enough. Acceptance can sound passive, as though he had simply stopped resisting. What I saw seemed more active. He had received a life he hadn’t chosen and immediately begun asking what he could still do with it.
The philosophers had a phrase for this stance- amor fati, the love of fate.
It’s commonly explained as accepting what you can’t change. And that definition is useful- just as saying the ocean means water you can’t drink. Jokes aside. Acceptance means acknowledging that something has happened. Amor fati asks a harder question- can you take this event, including the parts you hate, and make it part of a life you’re still willing to inhabit fully?
The Nietzschean Formula
The phrase itself is younger than the philosophy behind it.
Amor fati comes from Friedrich Nietzsche, who used it to describe what he considered one of the highest forms of human strength. His formula for greatness was that a person should want…