AMERICA'S BIGGEST LIE...?

Maybe it's not exactly a lie. Instead, call it a hope mixed with confidence plus a big dash of Yankee hubris. It's America's traditional mantra: I'm Master of My Fate...!

We tend to surge with this feeling be it in business or in war, be it in love or on the playing fields. Not a surprising mantra for a people who -- then and still today -- come from all over the world in the expectation that America is where they'll find their future. Even more, where they'll make their future.

Truth be told, it's been working out this way for over 300 years now. For millions. Of course, we tend to hear and read about them much more than the many more millions who don't. That's because Americans love a winner.

In arguable contrast to this master-of-my-fate catechism are my old Sicilian relatives. Back in the old country -- a psychological part of which they proudly took with them here -- there's another and very different mantra. You have to picture this now. When confronted with life and its many ill-starred twists of fate, first comes the stoic shrug. Then the even more stoic words, "Eh, so whatta you going' to do?!"

As I say, you have to experience it for yourself. Its staggering wisdom is in dark contrast to the sprightly American feel-good seminars on PBS, and the chirpy everyone-wins-the-game in today's gym classes. In quiet contrast, Uncle Joe and Aunt Rose have within their flesh and bones the 3000 year-old DNA of Sicily. A land great before America was a glint in the eye of history, Sicily has known grandeur but also the bloodshed of competing armies and repeated occupations. At times the Egyptians, the Phoenicians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Arabs, the Normans, the Mafia.

Like our America, it is stunningly beautiful from sea to shining sea. But, unlike our America, it's tasted the bitters of defeat, destruction, and despair. America's is the world's young, hubristic adolescent; Sicily is the wise old relative who watches the family celebrations without saying very much. Sicily -- like scores of other ancient cultures -- beams with its history of pride, yet at the same time has the lore to wear its pride with caution. It's slammed into Fate more than once, and each time it's learned that Fate (AKA, destiny, fortune, luck) is owned by no one. It's the guest at the table who you woo but never own...!

Now to be perfectly honest, I'm saying more about the wisdom of this reality than either Uncle Joe or Aunt Rose. They don't have to argue what they know. It's just that being a proud American of Sicilian descent, I straddle both our vision of Fate and theirs. On the one hand -- this creed that I can grab Fate by the throat and submit it to the power of my positive-thinking. On the other hand -- this suspicion that Fate is simply another word for what I can never really own, but what, with patience and purpose, I can learn to accept as it comes.

And it will come! To each of us, on its own terms and in its own time. Which makes a non-Sicilian by the name of Buddha worth listening to: "The truly contented person is not the one who gets what they want, but wants what they get...."