Amor Fati, Love your Fate
There is a moment in every real transformation when the old way no longer works, but the new way has not yet arrived. It is the long, curving, learning space between knowing and not knowing. And it is almost always filled with frustration. We are taught to treat this space as a problem to solve. Something to fix. Something to escape. But this is the deeper truth:
This is where resilience is built.
My brother was a surfer. He didn’t surf as a hobby, but as a way of being in the world. We grew up living close to the ocean, and he built his own boards in an old playhouse at our childhood home. He died too young, and years after he died, one of his close friends told me something that stayed with me: my brother’s favorite quote about how to live came from Nietzsche — amor fati, “love your fate.” Not just a phrase he liked, but a way he understood life. A way of meeting what comes instead of fighting the shape of things.
That conversation changed how I saw him. And how I saw life.
You don’t argue with the ocean. You don’t control the waves. You learn to read them, wait for them, and then commit when the moment comes. Most of surfing is sitting in not-knowing…watching, feeling, waiting. And when the wave comes, you don’t force it. You align with it. You ride it. And you accept that you cannot control how it will break.
That is amor fati in motion.
My husband is a surfer too. He understands this language of timing and humility in his body. This past Christmas, he gave me a small gold charm engraved with those same words. He knew exactly what they meant to me. Holding it, I felt my brother’s presence and the quiet continuity of that teaching moving through my life.
There is no straight line through the hardest parts of life. There is only a long, curving wave.
In my own life, through grief, burnout, and now the identity shift of retirement, I have come to see that this uncertain learning space is not something to be fixed. It is a season of becoming.
In Intuition Painting®, there is a moment when the image falls apart before it comes together. People want to fix it or abandon it. But if they stay, if they keep listening instead of forcing, something deeper begins to emerge.
Life does the same.
Resilience is not built by mastering the wave. It is built by learning not to abandon yourself while you are on it. The in-between is not empty. It is full of subtle information…sensations, hunches, quiet shifts of timing. But you can only feel these if you are willing to slow down enough to listen.
Frustration is often the mind’s protest against this kind of listening.
When we stay with not-knowing, we build something stronger than confidence. We build capacity, the ability to stay present without needing to see the whole shoreline. This is coherence. Not the absence of uncertainty, but the ability to remain whole inside it.
That little gold charm has become a touchstone for me. A reminder of my brother. A reminder of the ocean. A reminder that I don’t have to force the wave, only learn how to ride it. And it sits perfectly alongside another charm my husband gave me: a Catalina Island mermaid. We spent our honeymoon there, and have returned many times over the years for anniversaries and quiet escapes. It has become one of our favorite places — a landscape that holds memory, love, and the long rhythm of the sea.
Since I’ve been playing with Suno and creating songs I felt inspired to write a song in memory of my brother, who passed almost 25 years ago and had a profound influence on my life. It’s about roots, resilience, and learning to love the story you didn’t choose, amor fati, love your fate. You can listen to the song here: AMOR FATI (She Still Rises)
Sometimes the soul keeps teaching us the same lesson, just in new forms.
So if you find yourself in that long, learning space right now, unsure, unfinished, in between, consider this: You are not behind. You are not broken. You are being shaped. And resilience is quietly gathering beneath you, like a wave.
From my soul journey to yours,
Maria
