Fate

I, for one, do not believe in what they call "fate". I do not believe that all things are predetermined and that there's nothing you can do if you're "supposed" to die tomorrow. Well, I think there's probably nobody alive right now who can prove it anyway. Genetics may play a part in determining if someone's likely to get cancer and die from it, and maybe a facial feature determined by that same genetic defect may indicate the same thing. This however, is not a certainty, either. It's just an increase in the probability of an unlikely event to occur. If people won't like to read about stuff like this, please skip the following paragraphs. It's probably a tired idea for some thinkers anyway.

I was propping my pillow up and pondering about the nature of free will, and was thinking about people like spheres in a sea of spheres. When a certain sphere moves, everything around it is affected. Other spheres are pushed or pulled along by the motion, much like a spreading ripple when a pebble is tossed into a pond. Now, the question is whether that particular sphere had moved of its own accord, or it was pushed. Maybe it moved north (north being a specific direction relative to an imaginary standard) because it was being pushed from the east, west and south. To the sphere, it was moving of its own accord, because it moved into a path of least resistance and had probably benefited itself in some way. Satisfaction is gained from the knowledge that it is free to move.

Now, we zoom out and view it from a larger perspective. Far to the south, another sphere had moved north, forcing the earlier sphere to move north because of the resultant motion. So the southern sphere had, in effect, "forced" the northern sphere to move north as a result of its actions. Now, if the spheres were packed to near-full in a three dimensional space, it becomes even harder to find the original stimulus that had influenced the northern sphere's motion. Likewise, I believe that "fate" as people call it, is the result of the actions of people around us. It's just that the action was so far removed that its source is hard or impossible to trace. Complicating the matter is that actions that had occurred years ago can still have effects to this day.

On the whole, I feel that nothing that ever happens is a result of fate. It's all cause and effect. Being "lucky" isn't because one has some force pushing everything in a favorable direction. That "lucky" person just has influences that make desirable outcomes occur at that point of time. That exact same outcome could be undesirable to someone else, in a classic case of "one man's meat". That's why I don't believe in "luck" either. Even "luck" can be avoided if one has sufficient leeway and skill. Some of my friends are staunch believers in luck, and I'm not about to try to change their perceptions. I just don't like it when they insist that they're right and I'll see that they're right eventually. I've even had one claim that I was "unlucky" specifically because I didn't believe in "luck". The inverted commas are there because "luck" may be given other names by other people. It's strictly semantics at work here.

I just believe in cause and effect. Someone did something, and that's why terrible things happen to individuals. Interestingly enough, the environment is playing along as well, so we occasionally have the rough equivalent of a child jumping into a ball pit, tossing spheres everywhere. It's a complicated universe out there, especially if one believes that there are more than four dimensions to the current reality.