Destiny
I don’t believe in destiny. At least not in the sense that life is preordained. I think the choices we make determine our future.
If you jump off a high enough building, you will die when your body splats on the ground. Maybe Superman will fly by and catch you before you hit. Of course, that will be true only if there actually is a Superman, and he is nearby or not too busy.
A statement like it is your destiny to lead a happy, sad, meaningful, unremarkable, or eventful life is nothing more than a guess.
Only afterward can anyone confidently say that a person’s life was good or bad. Then you can say it was their destiny. But was it their destiny when they were born? I don’t think so.
No one can predict the future for an individual. Scientists can predict the end of life on Earth if we don’t act soon to stop polluting it. But that is based on known scientific facts, not prescience. I mean, if you fill a room with nothing but carbon dioxide and/or methane, you can rightfully say that anyone in that room will die because there is no longer any oxygen to breathe.
Each person’s future is determined by their upbringing, what they learned in school, the choices other people make for them, their choices for themselves, and their luck or lack of luck at any given moment. Since we can’t predict the future of a single person, we are not privy to anyone’s destiny.
Most of all, our futures happen because of the choices we make, our intelligence level, what age and civilization we are born into, the circumstances that befall us, and our determination to succeed at whatever we attempt. But even those things aren’t guaranteed to put us where we want to be at our death.
All any of us can do is work on our goals. If we want to have a happy life, we need goals. A person without goals has no path for their life. Walking along a road is a choice and more manageable than walking across uncharted ground. If you choose the uncharted path over the well-traveled one, you must be willing to have setbacks and have a real purpose for your chosen difficulties. Are the ends worth the means?
Every human being born on planet Earth is entitled to loving parents who will care for them until adulthood. They are entitled to share in whatever food, clothing, shelter, or abundance their parents can afford.
However, not all children are provided with the same life and opportunities. Some children must start working at extremely young ages. My Dad, for instance, started working in the fields at the age of eight.
By twelve, he also had to work for others to help provide the money needed for his many brothers and sisters. During the darkest time of the depression, the only food their family had to eat for over a year was biscuits and cane syrup at every single meal.
Even today, millions of children face similar circumstances.
My mother once told me, when I was young, that if all the money in the world were gathered together and divided equally among everyone, within one day, some people would have nothing, and some would be rich.
She was right. Although we all need the same things, we aren’t all created equally. Not everyone has parents. Some parents die, some leave for greener pastures, some are thrown in jail, some are drunks or addicts, and some are mentally ill or unstable. Some are disabled, and some have a mental illness.
Life isn’t fair, is it?
No human gets to decide which parents they are born to, when they will be born, or where. Life is dropped down on us, and we must take what we get, at least during the formative years of our lives.
Some of us are lucky, and some of us are not. We may be entitled to good parents and enough food and shelter, but in this world, not everyone gets their entitlement, do they?
Not everyone is willing to share, so governments have taxes. It’s why some nations assist other nations, while others rob and pillage.
Empathy is not spread evenly among all people. Yet, it is the one thing humanity needs the most.
So the next time you think something is unfair. Think again and figure out how to make it more fair for someone else, and pass that feeling of love on to someone who needs it more.
We are all in this together, aren’t we?
Love the graphic.
Regarding the paths we choose, some folks don't take any path at all.
It's been my experience that people who profess to believe in destiny/fate/whatever more often than not think of it as a negative, that they're just unlucky. The glass-half-empty folks. And tbh I think there is something to the science that says this is just how some of our brains are wired. Cool cool cool. But that doesn't mean we can't make choices to outmaneuver our lizard brains.