The art of interpretation.

How our childhood environment is a major factor in how our destinies unfold.

I don’t know if you have ever stopped to think about why you are who you are or what makes you make one decision over another?

As a young musician I once had a heated discussion with a fellow musician about whether we could control our own destinies: he was sure we could not and I, (in my naivety), believed we could.

As I grew older I started to think more and more about this question and I gradually came to realize that my friend was right: we have no control over our destinies.

Here’s why I have come to the conclusion that we do not really control our destinies:

Where you are born, who your parents are, how you were brought up and whether you were loved or not as a child are all enormous factors in how you think and make decisions. Then there is also the gene factor that contributes to the way your health and emotions work, (or don't work).

We don’t have control of any of these factors

Here is the story why I arrived at this belief:

The Wyce family in |Chelsea when I was about eight years old.
I am the youngest of three children.

Not long after this photo was taken, when I was about nine years old, my mother suddenly left; literally. Apparently they had a terrific row and when I woke up in the morning she was gone, leaving her three children with an angry, bitter and rather terrifying father.

My mother was gone for about a year and I must admit that my father did his best with us during that time.

Unfortunately he could not afford to keep paying the rent at our south London, Chelsea flat without my mother's income, so we moved to a flat in my grandparents' house on the other side of London, This meant that I was uprooted from the friends I had grown up with and the primary school I had been attending in Kensington and now had to go to a new primary school in North London.

This would have been worse if my grandparents had not taken pity on me and treated me to tea and smoked salmon every afternoon when I returned from school. Thank God for grandparents.

After about a year, my parents reconciled and my mother came back. Just like that. So they decided we could not continue to live in the flat in my grandparents house anymore and they rented a house in the countryside, (Berkshire, England to be precise). This meant that I had to go to a new primary school again for about six months before going to secondary school. I did enjoy living in the countryside though, and this was one of the happier times in my childhood.

The lease on the country house was only for two years, so my parents, who hated living in the countryside, made the decision to return to London. 

My sister, who was almost six years older than me, had already left home the year before, just before her eighteenth birthday, as she had found a job and a boyfriend in London. 

This meant that it was just my parents, my brother and me, but still, my parents were only able to rent a bed-sitting room big enough for them and my brother, but not for me. So not only was I forced to change school again, but I was obliged to go and live with my grandmother, who was on the other side of London from the school they had chosen for me.

During the six months I stayed with my grandmother I barely saw my parents. In fact I never even saw the bedsit they were living in.

They did finally find a flat in south London, not too far from my school, but by then I already had the feeling they really didn't care that much about me and were simply fulfilling their duty as parents and it was from this point on that I felt like I was the black sheep of the family. In retrospect this probably wasn't true as now I believe they were simply incompetent and alcoholic parents that simply were oblivious of how to bring up children.

However, as my father had a degree in psychology, this was all pretty hard to swallow.

As the choir at school was of professional standard and was known internationally, and we got to perform with many of the worlds' greatest orchestras and conductors, that influence on me was enormous and led me onto the path I was to follow for the rest of my life.

Considering I was basically breastfed Scotch, it is surprising that so far I have been lucky with my health. My brother and sister were less fortunate and died at relatively young ages. I guess I got the good genes. Again, destiny.

There are millions of people out there who have lived much worse lives than I have, so I do not tell this story with any kind of self pity but with the simple aim of showing you that I have simply followed my destiny. 

We all have the ability to make our own decisions, but we make those decisions according to our experience, and we don't always have control of those experiences. We are all following our destinies, whether we like it or not. Maybe what everyone refers to as luck should be more accurately labeled as destiny.