15 October marked Nietzsche’s 180th birthday. I offer you a passage from The Gay Science that gestures toward the ideas of “eternal recurrence” and “love of fate”: the belief that life should be lived in such a way that, if eternity meant nothing more than living this very life again and again for all eternity, we could still joyfully choose to be born again into this same life, experience this same life, and live our own self from beginning to end within the same experience. To desire lovingly our own self and our own destiny, to make them our own; to be willing even to live again all our pains and defeats for the sake of what, in the end, we have made of this story of ourselves and our fate. An idea as terrifying as it is filled with love for life.

What would you do if, one day or night, a demon came to you in your loneliest solitude and whispered:
This life, as you now live it and have lived it, you must live again, and innumerable times again; and there will be nothing new in it. Every pain, every pleasure, every thought and every sigh, and everything small or great that has happened in your life, will return to you in the same sequence, eternally, again and again.

Would you not throw yourself to the ground and curse that demon in lamentation?

Or perhaps you have lived life so deeply and extraordinarily that, filled with joy and passion, you would answer:
Greetings, god—for I have never wished or imagined anything more beautiful.

“Nietzsche — The Gay Science”