There is a danger in not connecting to the environment around us. There is a danger in not allowing our hearts to have thoughts. We become closed off to the entire world and our entire existence by ignoring nature; we become shells of people. Hillman (1997) discusses the calling of individuals in his book The soul's code: In search of character and calling. The book talks about how we are all subject to fate at some point when we get this idea about what we want to do with our lives. He claims that these kinds of "annunciations and recollections determine biography as strongly as memories or abusive horror" (1997). And though we all have some sort of trauma from our earlier years, from the beginning, he claims, we have a "definite individual character with some enduring traits" (1997). The book is about both character and calling and finding ways to dig down to the feelings, desires and person that one believes they have lost and resurrecting that person again. The book is about finding that image of the person that we thought we were a while back and changing our destinies in the process.

Hillman (1997) believes that people have been robbed of their true identity -- "the destiny written into the acorn" -- and the reasons that people go to therapy is to find a way to get it back.

That innate image can't be found, however, until we have a psychological theory that grants primary psychological reality to the call of fate. Otherwise your identity continues to be that of a sociological consumer determined by random statistics, and the unacknowledged daimon's urgings appear...

Repression, the key to personality structure in all therapy schools, is not of the past but of the acorn and the past mistakes we have made in our relation with it (Hillman, 1997).
Hillman (1997) asks in his chapter entitled "Fate" what happens when the soul chooses its daimon and life -- do we then have any ability to make decisions? The Greek idea of fate is about events happening to us, events that we cannot control, and thus they are events that "had to be" (1997). An interesting idea associated with this idea of fate is that these events are only events that "don't fit in" -- or out of the ordinary. So, Hillman (1997) asks, should we just think of fate as an "intervening variable?" Fate is given so much importance in our lives and we view fate as some kind of predictor of where we will end up in life. If one is to believe in fate, they are to believe that there is some "distant misty goal" (1997).