You do not have to account for the course your life has taken by the paucity of your chromosomes, ancestral traits, familial neglect, childhood traumas, the actions of your early years and the short long years now already long behind you. Your life is not written in stone and so you really don’t need to limit your world to what it should be or has to be. Sure, the hand you are dealt is random and who knows what destines one life for all the riches of success and another for the hardships of destitution. Our inequalities are what make us unique and, paradoxically equal, for there is no other being who is exactly the same as you, therefore it is only you who are blessed with one or more unique skills and abilities, whose confluence with your experiences yields the essence that is your singular character. The Ancient Greeks believed that it is your daimon that encompasses your lot in life—everything that is uniquely allotted for you. The daimon is your guardian, guiding you through the vicissitudes of life. Since the daimon is neither bound by time nor space, its dominion is infinitely extensible and the characterisations it imparts always flexible, evolving and growing over a lifetime and capable of being updated as you encounter new situations while staying vigilant to the sly winks of fate. To live in harmony with your daimon is to live in harmony with your true self instead of simply living in conformity with progress or expectations.

According to the ancient teachings, your true self is not your cultivated and fragmentary persona, but a wholeness of being that has faded into the shadows along the plains of time. But it still subsists within you; it is where your wisdom and creativity spring from in those brief moments when you give up the struggle for life. To bring it out of the shadows and cast it into the light of each present moment requires you to scrutinize events as they unfold from moment to moment and see what portion of that is part of your daimonic inheritance and what portion you have affected by dint of skill and is unaccountable. The former is out of your control, but that does not mean that you blindly fall into step with your inclinations. You invoke your abilities responsibly and allow yourself to even refrain from exercising them occasionally. And who knows? You may by pleasantly surprised as you encounter new situations and experiment with new ways of being.

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