What If Your Destiny Needs You?

What if destiny is not simply something that happens to you? What if it asks something of you?

I’m drawn to the possibility that a life carries an inward direction: gifts, inclinations and possibilities that ask to be lived. Reading about chi makes that question feel richer—and more demanding.

Chi, choice and a life among others

In The Role of Chi in Self-Actualization in Traditional Igbo Cosmology, Marcel I. S. Onyibor examines chi as a personal divine guardian associated with a person’s destiny. His account brings together differing interpretations rather than presenting one uncontested definition.^[1]

Some accounts he discusses describe a person choosing a destiny with their chi before birth, then forgetting it. Others describe chi as guarding a destiny allotted by the Creator. The question of who chooses is itself part of the debate.^[1]

Crucially, Onyibor also considers personal effort and responsibility. Destiny sits in tension with initiative; identity and accomplishment take shape within family and community. The paper’s account is more complex than either complete predetermination or unlimited individual control.^[1]

That is the tension I want to stay with. If something in a life is given, what is ours to do with it?

A conversation with the daimon

A striking comparison appears in Plato’s Myth of Er, at the end of the Republic. Souls choose lives before returning to earth; a daimon accompanies each as guardian and fulfiller of the chosen life. The story places responsibility on the chooser. In Benjamin Jowett’s translation, this daimon is called a ‘genius’.^[2][3]

These are distinct traditions, with different meanings and histories. I’m placing them in conversation around a question, not treating chi and daimon as two names for an identical belief.

And the question is this: what if fulfilling a life involves an active relationship with what we carry?

I find that more compelling than waiting for destiny to introduce itself with a job title. Perhaps the response is a practice. A body of work. A particular way of caring, making, teaching or participating in the lives of others.

Giving potential a lived form

This is where my own thinking about self-actualisation begins: giving lived expression to capacities and callings that feel deeply congruent with us. A potential may be inwardly felt, but its expression involves choices, relationships, time and craft.

If you feel drawn to write, there is still a page to write. If you feel drawn to sing, there is a voice to practise. If you want to bring people together, there are conversations to begin. The spiritual possibility and the ordinary work can belong to the same life.

I also want to leave room for how difficult that work can be. Obstacles do not tell me that someone has failed their destiny. A life unfolds amid circumstances we do not entirely choose, and becoming need not look like public recognition or commercial success.

What interests me is participation: answering something inward with something lived. Taking the recurring question seriously enough to explore it. Allowing a gift to acquire skill. Letting an idea meet the world and change through that meeting.

Perhaps self-actualisation is not only asking who we could become. Perhaps it is asking what our particular existence makes possible—and then taking part.

Edlin