A Word for Cultivating One's Destiny

Kismet • noun • (kizz-mitt)

Definition: Turkish: one’s portion or lot in life; English: destiny, fate

Origin: Turkish, Arabic

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My book THE CRIME WITHOUT A NAME was released on October 12, 2021 and NPR has picked it as one of the top books of the year!

You can order the book—including the audiobook—and watch recordings of my book tour discussions at Eaton and the New York Public Library at thecrimewithoutaname.com.

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This week’s word was recommended to me by Jack Britton, SCL’s Philosophy Fellow, and it is a subtle example of how an actively passive culture impacts language. American English is for the most part an actively passive language, and this characteristic becomes abundantly clear and unmistakable once you recognize it.

When words are actively passive, the power and action associated with the word does not reside with the community or individual, but with some mysterious entity or force that resides beyond the person. The speaker of the word does not give it meaning, but instead is tasked with waiting for its arrival or pursuing its power.

Two great examples of actively passive words in American English are love and happiness.

While we all know that love is both a verb and a noun, it is far too common for English-speakers to primarily relate to it as a noun or to expect another person, but not ourselves, to treat it as a verb. People talk about “being in love” as if love existed as a place that we found and now the task is to passively exist within this place. Likewise, when people no longer romantically love one another, they often describe this state as “falling out of love.” Linguistically and psychologically, not only have they left the space where love resides, but they did not even actively leave the space. They fell from the space of love. They passively left their passive environment.

Despite love being a verb—and the Greeks even have a specific word for the action of loving: agapó—we often do not talk about creating, cultivating, and sustaining love. We talk about finding love and staying in love. In English, we have both the verb and the noun, but unfortunately we appear to prefer the noun.

In the United States, our relationship to happiness is also actively passive, and this passivity is etched into our Declaration of Independence because that document promised Americans “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.”

Since the United States’ inception, happiness was never something that our society aspired to create, but merely something we were allowed to pursue. Linguistically, happiness did not reside within the United States or within Americans. It existed beyond this nation, and the United States committed itself to not impeding Americans in their pursuit of happiness regardless of where it may reside.

In these iterations of love and happiness, the power of the word resides apart from the speaker, and much like Vladimir and Estragon in Waiting for Godot our task has been to merely wait for or pursue its arrival.

Tragically, kismet has become an actively passive word despite its active origin.

Kismet and Travel

Kismet is a Turkish word that was absorbed into English in the 1800s, and it derives from the Arabic word qisma that means “portion” or “lot”. One’s qisma was their portion of or lot in life, coming from the active root verb qasama meaning “to divide” or “to distribute.” But as this word travelled through the Middle East, past the Bosphorus and into Europe, and finally to England in the northwest corner of the continent, the meaning of the word changed from something active into something passive.

In English, kismet started to mean “destiny” or “fate,” and this definition is so far removed from “portion” or “lot” that it makes you wonder how the British have chosen to perceive their relationship with the world. Kismet could only mean fate if one believed that one’s portion or lot existed beyond one’s control, and there is an obvious passivity in this perspective.

The profound distinctions between these two definitions remind me of the childhood game of telephone where a bunch of children sit next to each other and one person starts the game by whispering a word or a phrase into the ear of the child next to them. You only get one chance to say the word or phrase, and you can’t say it loud enough so that the other children can hear it, so it is common that the word or phrase articulated by the last child bears no resemblance to the initial word.

Kismet has embarked on a similar journey but the elementary school classroom has been replaced by two continents and multiple languages.

It is logical that the spelling would change as the sound of the word is expressed in a different language, so the transition from qisma to kismet is not surprising, yet the shift in meaning is incredibly profound and alarming.

When I played telephone as a child it was normal for one student to not clearly hear the word, and rather quickly the game would proceed comically downhill. The game was funnier when the ending did not match the beginning, and there would always be some kid who would mess up on purpose because they thought it would be funny. Yet despite the initial laughter of linguistic mishaps, we would always realize that the game was actually more fun and meaningful if we got it right. The entire class would have a sense of accomplishment when we got it right, and this satisfaction outweighed short-term laughs.

This childhood game is a great analogy for kismet, and many other English words, because we have gotten the words wrong, and this is no laughing matter.

One’s portion or lot in life should encourage an active engagement with the world, and qisma invokes this sentiment, but kismet never has in English. When kismet refers to a destiny that exists outside of ourselves, it becomes harder to think about actively engaging with that destiny instead of passively waiting for it.  One’s portion or lot is the equivalent to one’s garden, and one is responsible for cultivating one’s garden. We are responsible for ensuring that life can grow and thrive within our portion of existence.

As Voltaire said at the end of Candide, “We must cultivate our garden,” yet in an actively passive world people have hardly any desire to cultivate their gardens. Instead they want to find or wait for the arrival of a perfect garden, or resign themselves to a fate where nothing grows. 

Kismet and Fate

Fate is a beguiling concept because we are instructed to let ourselves go to fate and to passively love fate. 

In the 1800s, just as kismet was making its way across Europe, German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche also felt the need to embrace fate as part of his philosophy by invoking the Latin phrase amor fati which translates as “love of fate” or “love of one’s fate.” 

As a Turkish word was being mistranslated as it traversed the continent, a German philosopher felt the need to invoke a Latin phrase to profess the need of accepting the idea that our fate or kismet is out of our control.

Fate is allegedly a mysterious force that we are powerless to control and we just need to accept. There is a futility to fighting fate, yet for some reason people do not seem fearful of fate. This understanding of one’s fate is incredibly bizarre.

Fate is allegedly a force that shapes our lives regardless of our actions, yet we are led to believe that more often than not fate will not engage in anything nefarious or detrimental. Fate allegedly has an inherently positive inclination, or at least a non-negative one. If we believed that fate would have a negative impact on our lives, then few people would be willing to embrace the idea of amor fati.

The westernized concept of fate will allegedly ensure that everything will turn out okay. And if we believe in this notion of fate then we will be discouraged to have an active relationship with our world where we are held responsible for our actions.

If we live in a world without fate and instead with portions or lots that we ourselves must cultivate, then the responsibility for the absence of a growing garden would reside within the community or the individual.

Fate allows us to believe that the inability to cultivate a garden does not reside with us, but instead with a force that has already predetermined our outcomes. This has led to a worldview in which people have become inherently good or inherently bad because those are allegedly the cards that fate had dealt them instead of merely being people who have engaged in either good or bad actions.

It is easy to cultivate an actively passive relationship with the world when you aspire to live an irresponsible life or not be held responsible for your actions. America was founded upon ethnocide and genocide, and America aspires to exist as an inherently good place that will never be held responsible for these foundational atrocities. Our irresponsible roots have cultivated an actively passive status quo that produces unhealthy fruit.

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