Manifest Destiny

(From Cambridge dictionary)

There's an irritating self-help phrase that thankfully one doesn't see much of anymore--"controlling your own destiny" (by definition you cannot change your destiny/fate)--but the sentiment, however awkwardly stated, is clear: achieving one's goal requires planning and execution and now many people add something else, manifesting.

Visualizing the success you want to achieve, or manifesting, took off this year.

Go online, and seemingly everyone is making vision boards, writing down their goals repeatedly and saying them aloud like a mantra.

Singer Dua Lipa swore by it to achieve big goals, and Cambridge Dictionary named “manifest” its word of the year. In the first eight months of 2024, there were more than 130,000 searches for it on the dictionary’s website. On TikTok, the hashtag #manifesting has 1.6 million posts and #manifestation has 6.5 million.

Some psychologists say its current meaning, which involves visualizations and affirmations to make something happen, can be traced to the bestselling 2006 book “The Secret.” Its recent resurgence reflects a desire for people to exert control over their lives, even when the outcome might be largely out of their hands...

Successful people have long worked to visualize the outcome they wanted or repeated positive phrases to achieve a goal. But recently, as more people have taken it on, they say they have learned a key lesson: If you don’t couple manifesting with action, it can be a waste.

What distinguises manifesting is the picturing of the goal before one plans and executes. Your humble blogger didn't do much visualization during his productive years and undoubtedly could have accomplished more than he did. But he...I...ended up happy in ways that I did not envision. Manifesting can help, but it isn't for everybody, especially if life is more journey than goal.

Appreciate It For Its Own Sake

A Storm in the Rocky Mountains, Mt. Rosalie’ (1866), by Albert Bierstadt (WSJ/Brooklyn Museum of Art)

A work of art that was famous, then forgotten, then rediscovered, Storm in the Rocky Mountains (1866) helped to rekindle the American spirit after the carnage of the Civil War:

Created in the gloomy Civil War era, the painting conveys the grandeur of the American West at a time when the nation’s belief in Manifest Destiny roused hopes and dreams even for citizens who were not headed west. Studded with emblems of the frontier—a soaring eagle, a black bear, pristine lakes, big skies, steep cliffs and a Native American camp—“A Storm” is, in the words of art historian Linda Ferber, writing in the museum’s 2006 “American Paintings in the Brooklyn Museum: Artists Born by 1876,” “a pivotal work in American cultural history.”

Modern historians who view history through a normative lens describe the period following the Civil War as an era to be deplored by late 20th century standards, when the United States adopted the imperialist philosophies of the European nations and rode roughshod over indigenous peoples.

If we dispense with moralizing but focus on the descriptive, the "winning of the West" was inevitable, given the developments of the Industrial Revolution, the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad (1869), and the incentives of the Homestead Act (1862).

The creation of the sea-to-shining-sea America in the 19th century produced an America that won two World Wars and one Cold War, the latter without significant casualties. Must we take the evil with the good? That's way above this humble blogger's pay grade.

Setting aside our--and I include myself in this tendency--to look at everything through an ideological or political lens, I can appreciate Storm in the Rocky Mountains, Mt. Rosalie as a work of art by itself. May I do more of that in the New Year.