Fate, Destiny, Free Will, Choices

It's getting late on a Friday night, and I've been up since 5am without much sleep, but yet, in my semi-awake state, I figured I could ramble here since there is such a small audience that it doesn't really matter.

Of late, there has been some discussions between myself and some people, and also internally in regards to life being a mixture of possibilties, with fate, destiny and free-will.

Really at the end of the day, it all still boils down to making a choice.

Fate and destiny are very similar, in that if you believe in this school of thought and philosophy, you prescribe to that your life and everyone elses has a pre-determined outcome and with different variants of the school, either it is planned out every period of time, or with significant events in between.

If you prescribe to free-will, then you tend to fall more into that, you are ultimately in control of your life and the future is unknown since the path has not yet been walked.

But, if you back up on both of them to a certain point, you still always have a choice. Everything we do on a daily basis, is always about choice. Choice to stay in bed and sleep in, to get out of bed, breakfast or no breakfast? So forth and so on. But whatever you like to do in terms of taking comfort when things go unexpectedly (good or bad, doesn't really matter) is what makes the difference.

So as a mechanism, if you are a fatalist, then an event can be viewed of the opinion that "it was meant to be", while a determinist would say "it was because of my choices". But, of course getting philosophical here, "it was meant to be" still comes from you making choices to that event, of course your choices may have been pre-determined for you, but you still made those *choices*.

On the flip side of course is that being a consequence of your choices, it is hard to debate that they were really *your* choices, and not choices made already for you, that you decided upon.

So, really at the end of the day, it comes to attitude differences. Will you take responsibility for your actions? Or rather, place focus upon forces beyond your control?

For me, I have a mix of both. There may be some grand plan, but I still make my choices as I see fit, since I try to not live with regret. So, take those leaps and risks at times, and flourish in those choices made. The outcomes good or bad are part of life experiences, and in the future when faced with similar choices, at least either you've learnt the consequences because you caused them, or you don't get a choice about the choices you made so you should just face them head on and take them strongly as they come.

Living is a risk. Life can lead to more life or death, and in many cases, both. Burn bright with what you can do, live to the full as best you can without burning others too badly perhaps, and don't worry about if it's meant to be or not, just do as you see fit being who you are, after all, no-one else can really be you, except you.

/ramble.