Fate and Free Will March 4th, 2011
A few times in the last few months I’ve resorted to telling myself: “you have no free will”, in order to get through a difficult situation. Mostly this helps me to relax a bit in the beginning, and then things just seem to take care of themselves from there.
I was somewhat comforted to find recently that it works the other way around too, when I caught myself thinking, “You’ll remember you don’t believe in any of this fate crap. You’re in control of your own life.”
I used to think people who said and/or believed in the idea that “everything happens for a reason” were just deluding themselves. And while I’m not saying by any means that I’ve now become a convert, I can’t ignore that I’ve been having experiences that are making me wonder. And these things are coming at me from all sorts of different directions.
I’ve also said a number of things which make a moderate degree of sense when I say them, but then not long thereafter something happens and they fit in even better with the future situation. I’ve been wondering if other people have done this also. It’s making me question our concept of time… “It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.”
Quite a while back I put “tempting fate to convince me” on my Facebook profile as my religious view. I didn’t really know what I meant by it, I mostly just thought it sounded neat and quirky. Sometimes now I will do this with a bit more intention, i.e. say something that I feel like saying but don’t entirely know why, expecting it will become more clear to me later why I said it. And frequently it does.
I don’t know where this fits in in this post but frankly, if I look back on these words in a few months and think that I was completely off my rocker, I’ll probably be happy about that. Maybe it’s all “chicken wings and beer”.
Practically speaking – and all kidding about winning lotto numbers aside – if we really had the ability to foretell the future, I think we would find ourselves wishing we weren’t so gifted. It is rather unnerving and also a bit sad to think that things are set, that we have no free will.
Most of us would agree that we don’t truly know if we have free will or not. I think it’s better that way, because it means the doors are open to so many possibilities. It means that, in a way, we can have both fate and free will, choose whichever, whenever we need it.
