Fate is contradictory; either you’re told that you must decide your own, or someone will sigh, bat their eyelashes dramatically at you and say, “It was fate.” Ultimately, who is it that decides? Are we to accept that there is a semi-controllable force directing our lives? You could say it was fate that you ended up in the same elevator as the cute guy from work, but you could also argue that your inner drive pushed you to it. Which is it?
It’s both.
Fate is the collection of every decision you’ve ever made. What you’ve been told about choosing your destiny is essentially true. It’s controlled by your choices. These choices could be as simple as going right instead of left at a stop sign, or as momentous as quitting your job. The difference is that each one leads you to a new realm: a place of hundreds of different choices, people, and things that you never would have experienced had you chosen otherwise. Your fate is controlled by your collective decisions, the history of all of your choices, each influenced by another. It’s a prophetic butterfly effect, influencing not only your future, but everyone else’s.
Fate is tricky that way. What makes it only semi-controllable is that one person cannot dictate the choices on every other human being on Earth, and that collective is a much larger force to be reckoned with. But that influences you, too. Every decision the people you’ve merely passed on the street led up to that very moment with you; not a minute earlier, not a second later. The people that have come into your life have made a series of choices that pointed them to you. Their choices years ago impacted you then. But not really, because you never knew it. Maybe you never would have met your best friend in college if she hadn’t decided to cut through the recreation center that day. Perhaps your parents would have never met if your mother had taken that other job instead. You would’ve never met your boyfriend if his parents hadn’t divorced, causing him to move in next door. It’s when other people’s collectives collide with your own that you cross paths, and that’s based on thousands of intricate decisions before you.
The key it utilizing it. In a sense, you are carving out your own fate, but only at the mercy of all of the decisions since the beginning of time. This makes moments that much more valuable, and that much more of a loss if they are passed over. In a single moment, hundreds of thousands of choices that aren’t even yours are converging, and it’s up to you to choose how to take advantage of it. Your fateful decision in that moment resonates like ripples in a pond, pulsing to the edges of the collective consciousness.
The next time you’re asked if you believe in fate, the answer has to be yes. Part of it is yours to influence. The second half of your answer would have to be based on your faith in the rest of humanity’s ability to choose.
Author: Sam Raudins
Email: [email protected]
Author Bio: Sam is a journalism major at Ohio State who lives for football and good iced chai lattes. She runs her own blog, and writes for The Lantern and the Odyssey. Soon, she will be starting a football column by a woman for women at the Ohio State chapter of Her Campus.
Link to social media or website: http://theinternalmonologue.weebly.com
