A Short Meditation On Fortune (Cookies)
Surrender is a truth of the human experience
Here is some information to start: I am currently walking from Berlin to Portugal. Greetings from Weimar! For the next several months, I will share writing directly from my journal inspired by my travels. I am not sharing entries in the main blog that speak directly to the day-to-day process of my walk, as that seems to be outside the spirit of the blog’s stated theme. I may share more of that in a new section. I hope you enjoy it!
On my second day of the tour, I found my first fortune cookie of the trip. If you don’t know, I have a magic power—no, not flight, invisibility, or strength. No, not heat vision, wall-crawling, or echolocation. No, not slimy skin and a pallid demeanor… Look, can I just say it?
So it’s not the most glamorous power, but it’s the world to me. I find fortune cookies… a lot (hold your applause). Do I live near a pan-Asian restaurant? Well, two blocks, why do you ask? Do I use that to collect fortunes sometimes when I want a little pick me up or a daily horoscope? Of course, sometimes I need to wet my beak a little. But I must clarify that I find them anywhere: airports, in nature, randomly in the city, or covered in dust and wedged in gratings next to stairwells (I was especially proud of that one), etc. It’s really just about looking.
The Fortune Cookie
“The sowing is laborious, but the harvest will be rich.”
I found the fortune cookie on the sidewalk on the path between Teltow and Saarmund. It was just sitting on the pavement, slightly beaten up, slightly dissolved, still mostly readable. It reminded me of another one I found a few months ago before I decided to leave, which, in hindsight, seemed to foreshadow my adventure.
“Your way is challenging, but you will be sufficiently rewarded.”
Maybe at this point, it’s valid to mention I don’t make any major life decisions based on fortune cookies. Nor do I recommend making big life decisions based on tarot or any other divination method. I make them almost entirely based on intuition or gut decisions. (More on that in a future entry)
For me, a fortune cookie I find on the ground is more like a horoscope or a tarot reading. Some latent energy from the universe or some Rorschach test for me to consider the message. Will it match to my life or my day in any way? Possibly. Will it give me something to consider and see if I have any emotional connection or personal association? That’s the lens I try to use.
It’s never wise to put too much weight into divination, especially when your practice is Aporrimatomancy, a term I have just coined that means “divination by interpreting discarded or thrown-away items.”
I would call this one of the most humble divination methods, but a cursory internet search tells me that Spatilomancy exists—divination employing feces. Given a range of items to use for divination, I always suggest aiming slightly higher than feces, whether it’s your own, a friend’s, or an animal’s.
I like the sowing metaphor for my adventure here. It reminded me that so many human endeavors require some act of faith or surrender to the unknown or the forces of nature. I am on an adventure, but in the words of Helen Keller, “Life is either a daring adventure or nothing” (another fortune cookie I found). The farmer doesn’t know if they will be successful, but they work hard and hope for a bountiful harvest.
We never know what we will find in this life. Nothing is guaranteed, as much as we might like to imagine it is. Nothing is within our control. Every morning when we wake up, we hope for the best. Society has conditioned us to believe in safety and relative ease; for thousands of generations, that was never true. Our DNA is coded for survival. Our nervous system is primed to have us fight for our lives or run for them. The whole human experiment is a daring adventure. Can we trust in Nature or God or Ourselves to safely make it over the threshold of Home? Trust in not knowing. Work hard and surrender to the experience.
We never know whether the seeds we plant will germinate successfully. As the saying goes, “Society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they will never sit.”
We should never act to elicit a response. We do what is correct, regardless of the outcome. We act to help others without knowing if we will ever see the fruits of our work. That is our way. That is its own reward. If everything works out, all the better. It is folly to pursue something we do not control. Folly all the more to act only to elicit a response, not simply because it is correct and morally or ethically good. That is like a worker who seeks the proper answer only for the boss’s approval; they will always be passed over for promotion by a competent boss because they do not challenge authority.
There is no objective good anyway. We can only act in the ways that we personally determine to be best. That is all that is required of us.
I didn’t undertake this endeavor to get anything out of it. I simply needed to get to Portugal by June. I have an idea of a harvest for myself, similar to the ideas I had when I quit my job. I want to continue my meditation practice, live a simpler life, and dedicate my life to helping others. I want to see where the path leads me and meet the version of myself who makes it to the end.
Another fortune cookie I found before I left Berlin:
“A path only becomes a path once traveled.”