“What we do in life echoes in eternity,” Russell Crowe’s voice thundered in Gladiator, one of those films from the early 2000s that still lingers like a half-remembered dream. I toss out that line sometimes when someone asks me about fate, even though its meaning in the movie was carved from a different stone. People seem to crave a simple answer—that fate’s a myth, that life’s just a stack of choices. Maybe Father Tadej’s words, “Our thoughts determine our lives,” threw them for a loop, making them think they can sculpt their future with a few well-placed daydreams. If he’d known we’d call it “manifesting” today, with its self-help gurus, glossy books, and armies of believers chasing miracles without breaking a sweat, he might’ve grabbed an eraser and wiped that phrase clean off the page.

But here’s the real picture… Imagine tossing a stone. The moment it leaves your hand, its arc is already written, destined to land exactly where physics demands—no inch left, no inch right. We’re like that stone, hurtling through life. Long before it lands, we know where it’s bound, just as Today carves the outline of Tomorrow. Every spark of desire, every quiet yearning in our bones, sets the course for what’s to come, tethered to a past that stretches back into the fog of forever. We’re born mid-flight, each of us on a path lit by longings we don’t choose—they choose us, tugging at our hearts, pulling us like gravity.

Sometimes we’re just starting out, close to the launch, buzzing with energy, hearts alight with the thrill of something new taking wing—a dream, a love, a burst of youth. It’s like a kite soaring, not yet caught by the earth’s pull, brimming with potential (potential energy), moving slow and deliberate. It feels like we’re defying gravity itself, rising like a bright idea, a fleeting emotion, a wild hope. But then comes the descent. The kinetic rush kicks in, and we speed up, like life after fifty, when the midlife itch makes us act, react, move—no more waiting. We want to swerve, to rewrite the path, but we can’t. So we accelerate, chasing the spark of what’s left before the ground rushes up to meet us.

That unspent potential? It burns to be born, especially when it senses the fall is near.

But here’s the twist—reaching that potential doesn’t always mean a soft landing. Think of Uranus, what is the purpose of Uranus but to give everything to others, leaving itself empty. Those are heavy lives, yet their purpose is fulfilled. Or Neptune, luring us toward solitude, a quiet drift into the vast unknown.

That’s life’s rhythm. Zoom out, and it’s a grand arc stretching back to ancestors three centuries gone, their whispers still shaping us. Those “random” thoughts, the “choices” we swear we made, the chances we let slip—they were already sketched by someone, somewhere, long ago. Like a riverbed guiding the water, our path depends on whether we’ve got the grit, the heart, the fire, or the sheer luck to follow it. And don’t forget the world around us—those external forces we hate admitting hold the reins. Will that Venus in Leo trine Jupiter bloom into a woman who chases knowledge from girlhood, her eyes on the skyline of big cities, seeking love where peace and plenty dance? Or will it be her daughter, her granddaughter, her great-granddaughter, because she herself wasn’t bold or radiant enough to live that story? Maybe self-doubt weighed heavier, or her Saturn in Scorpio crouched on her Ascendant like a shadow, chaining her to bare-bones beginnings. Venus’s ease and abundance stayed out of reach, forcing her to grind instead of glide. She leaned into Saturn’s iron will, living it, deepening it, passing it on. No wide smiles, no soaring hopes—just a wry, crooked smirk, a stubborn heart, untouchable in its quiet strength. Not the sparkling Jupiterian grace of princesses waving from balconies, tossing kisses to the crowd but never stepping down. No, hers is more a knowing scoff than a laugh, more grit than glow, more absence than abundance.

So she’ll wander through novels more than continents, or maybe she’ll become a doctor, healing women whose lives are polished and full. In love, she’ll stay tethered to Saturn—cool, distant, untouched—rather than basking in fleeting romances that barely flicker in her long wait (she’ll confess to an astrologer one day, half-wondering why). She’s bound to solitude, or maybe to someone by habit, if her roots are steeped in tradition. And yet, you’d say, that solitude must break—but only when her life is steady, grounded in material security, maybe not until her fifties. Her dog, though? That loyal shadow will pad alongside her from her twenties, a constant in the quiet. She might mourn her “fate” at times, but she’s guarding that pristine Venus aspect, unspent, for her children—if she has them. And you should tell her: ‘Have a daughter!’, or if not, a granddaughter will carry that spark, skimming the cream of the potential her ancestors built. Maybe a son comes first, marrying into a family of elegance because the women of his time couldn’t match Venus and Jupiter’s power. Because it must unfold toward its peak, just as it must burn out to rise again.

That girl will be born, someday, to live the full picture of that Venus-Jupiter promise from her mother’s, grandmother’s, or great-grandmother’s chart. A picture that’s already been painted once. Where? In a life of woman who walked with grace, status—more noble than fiery, more lofty than approachable. Maybe they were aristocrats once, waiting for brighter days, because the best Venus aspects bloom only in rare moments of plenty. Mars, though, thrives in the rough times, easier to wield when the world’s jagged. That mother, with Saturn heavy on her Ascendant, might cling to the legacy of a grandfather who doctored a village for fifty years before a hospital even existed, or another who raised dikes by the river, which is why her desk sits by the Danube, crunching numbers or engineering waterworks at hydroelectric power plant. The Venus-Jupiter trine skips her but flows through her bloodline.

Whether these pictures repeat or spiral, they’re handed down through time not just to happen but to unfurl, like a film rolling frame by frame. They evolve, live out their potential, and those who embody them at their peak start to spend it. The next in line grow a little reckless, tipping toward the fall, until it’s all used up. From Mars in Aries, full of fire, we slide to Mars in Libra—potential spent, motion at its fastest, energy at its lowest. Planets in fall burn bright and brief, all to set the stage for someone, maybe a century later, to rise again, soaring through vision and will until they, too, burn out.

And that’s why it happens—what?

Those with planets in fall or exile feel the itch to save, to rebuild, to breathe life back into something fading—before those with planets in glory, who carry the world’s weight to keep it shining. Because they’ll start to spend it. A Sun in Aquarius frets over order more than one in Leo, a Saturn in Cancer wrestles with restraint more than one in Capricorn, a Mercury in Sagittarius ponders the weight of words more than one in Gemini. Planets in fall are future potential, if we catch the thread in time.

Fate’s a current we can’t escape, woven from pictures set long ago (by who? who knows!). Choice? That’s just the surface—our ego bristles at admitting it’s shaped by where we’re born, the times we live in, the air we breathe. What we’re dealt decides what we’ll “choose” to chase, what pulls us back, what we lift or let sink. Every one of us had an ancestors who were both hero and shadow, splitting siblings—one a Sun in Leo, the other in Aquarius.

Or picture someone packing up for a new country, swearing they’re rewriting their fate. Not without a grandfather who sailed to Argentina in 1950, a great-grandfather in Marseille, or a grandmother who carried the spark of an Italian soldier’s blood. It’s already there, or it isn’t. Even abroad, they become only what they can—it’s written. Those with Neptune in Sagittarius, so many of them, who left home? They slipped into solitude. Wanderlust. Our nurses in Germany, blessed with Neptune’s harmony to the Sun or Jupiter (often in Aries). But those with Neptune squaring Jupiter, Mars, the Moon, or Saturn? They’re the ones in foreign jails for scams, or paperless, drifting. Emigration reshapes their faith, lands them on pills, in third-shift bars, scrubbing museum floors, faking marriages, addresses, or guru status (Instagram’s full of them). Until they see the horizon’s goal was always the wandering itself, set ages ago to be the destination. They know less and less—what they’ll do, if they’ll stay—because they weren’t meant to know. That Neptune, born in ancient migrations, sea-tossed ancestors, only finds its faith and optimism in drifting, hoping, crashing, and drifting again.

So what’s Fate, then?

That which can neither be created nor destroyed, only reshaped, flowing from one form to another. Call it Energy. Call it Pluto. It hums in every planet, just as everything in this world fades a little each day. “Falling apart” is humanity’s poetic sigh; better to say it transforms. Every life, every bond, every age. When you feel that shift, you haven’t ditched your chart’s aspects—you’ve just sunk deeper into them, maybe glimpsing their core, a keyhole glowing with eternal light, love, peace. The Ascendant’s another key. Without understanding its ancient spark, it’s all for nothing. What does ease mean to a Capricorn Ascendant? What’s individuality to a Leo Ascendant, with no one to dazzle but itself?

Astrology guides us through the corridors of time, letting us uncover the causes that shaped this today while also revealing the future and the aspirations of the Ascendant, the Sun, the Moon, and beyond. It reveals the needs we now recognize—what they are, what they long to become, what they must become. Not always what our rational mind desires, nor always for our own good. But certainly, for the good of those yet to come.

So instead of a conclusion, here’s a handful of voices, like mine tonight or yours whenever, wrestling with fate’s shadow:

“A man does not make his destiny: he accepts it or denies it.”
– Ursula K. Le Guin

“I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I’ve gone which would not have happened if I had not come.”
– Salman Rushdie

“Everything is determined, the beginning as well as the end, by forces over which we have no control. It is determined for the insect, as well as for the star. Human beings, vegetables, or cosmic dust, we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible piper.”
– Albert Einstein

“Destiny is a feeling you have that you know something about yourself nobody else does. The picture you have in your own mind of what you’re about will come true. It’s a kind of thing you kind of have to keep to your own self, because it’s a fragile feeling.”
– Bob Dylan

Cloud Atlas, film (2012)
„Our lives are not our own. We are bound to others, past and present, and by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future.”