Fate is the word Nietzsche used. But it’s not the right word. Fate implies that things will unfold the way they’re supposed to, as if it were scripted in the stars and you’re just running your lines.

Fate, in that way, is bullshit.

And all the astrological talk about Mercury being in retrograde, or whatever it is, is bullshit.

Nietzsche thought it was bullshit too.

Fate isn’t what is written. Fate is what is.

When he wrote amor fati, he had something bigger in mind. A thought experiment. One night, a being appears and tells you that everything you’ve ever lived (every high, every low, every mundane minute, everything in perfect detail) you’ll live again. Exactly the same. Over and over, forever.

Amor fati is hearing that and calling the messenger an angel instead of a demon.

It means joyously signing up to do it all over again. To sit atop this glassing knob getting slapped in the face by the chest strap, looking at miles and miles of rangeland, no oryx in sight. No reply on my phone.

Most of us would call the being a demon. We’re constantly waiting for life to get better. But amor fati is not putting up with your life. It’s loving it. Every single part of it. Wanting to do all of it over and over again forever.

Here’s the key to getting there: you have to notice every little part of it, in as close to perfect detail as you can.

I used to meditate. I downloaded the Headspace app and would sit on my floor for fifteen minutes trying not to think. After months of this, I quit. I decided I’d wasted enough hours of my life, fifteen minutes at a time. I deleted the app.

But what I thought was a waste of time in meditation turned out to be one of the most important tools in learning how to love every single part of my life. What meditation taught me was to create separation between the experience of life and observation of the experience. Not to detach from it, but to feel it more fully.

As hunters, we have a head start. In Coming Home to the Pleistocene, Paul Shepard passes along poet Gary Snyder’s suggestion that meditation was invented by motionless hunters. There’s no more meditative practice than noticing the way a breeze can change directions when you’re waiting for a deer to stand from its bed so you can draw your bow and release an arrow. You feel it on your neck, followed shortly by a sense of “FUUUUUCK” in your mind, as you imagine it broadcasting your position to anything downwind of you.

Meditation is no more than noticing the smallest, tiniest, easiest-to-miss details about your experience in the world. When you find an observational viewpoint of what anguish feels like in the body, what joy feels like in your body, you have the space to appreciate both for what they are: a deep, true experience of life itself.

And with that appreciation, you can love what is, exactly as it is, over and over and over again forever. With that appreciation, you can amor fati.