The Answer to Destiny

Mistakes are inevitable. This was the conclusion of a post I made a good while ago, a post which was misunderstood by some, especially RSZ who skipped off in to the sunset with joy thinking it meant that what was meant to be was meant to be. Now I didn't really approve of this, but due to a lack of words I dared not venture further in to the heart of the matter. But recently I finally came across something that allowed me to explain my concept of destiny and fate.

Now destiny and fate has always been somewhat of a contradiction for me. Some people conveniently dump things under fate, whilst others are lumped under our control. Apparently we have fate and yet free will at the same time. Our actions are predetermined and yet we have control. How can this be?

Still I was of a similar school of thought. Some things in our lives are out of our control, whilst others are definitely under our reins. Now to the good stuff...

The concept that came my way was that of something being semi-variable. This means it consists of a fixed portion and a variable portion. A good example of this is your phone bill if you have an account. Every month without a doubt you know how much your rental is. It's fixed and you don't have control over it. What you do have control over are the actual call charges per month.

How does this work with destiny? Simple really... there's a large portion of our lives that is out of our control like where we were born, what the life we came in to consists of, the schools we go to and pretty much a lot of our early lives. Other facets include our strongest personality traits and quirks which are pretty much fixed.

Under our control on the otherhand are the small day to day actions that we take. What direction we choose to take in life. It is through the various small actions we undertake that over time we can actually influence the larger destiny as a whole.

However the points that we can end up at are fixed from the day we are born. Through the variable part that we influence, we can end up in one of many different fixed positions but we cannot manufacture a new one. It may seem that there are an infinite number of possibilities, but in reality there are an immense amount of finite probabilities that might give the illusion of complete free will.

So it is my belief that a person can't say 'my destiny is set'. You might have only 5 places to go, but to which one is up to you.

That's my final answer... for now.