Fate or Choice?

Fate… and choice… two words which look so tiny but actually summarizes one human life entirely. Everything done, every step taken, every word said, every action performed… everything can be categorized into either fate or choice. There is ultimately nothing else. Or is there? There is. Fate and choice are just two sides of the same coin. If you choose something in life, it’s a choice. If you fail to choose due to multiple factors, it is fate. Fate is nothing but lack of making a choice. So life is basically built on the choices you make or the lack thereof. The inability to choose can have various factors to it, the major contributor to it being the society. There is a sales technique I had come across in one of the workshops I attended – the best salesman is the one who manages to either convince or confuse the customer.

That is exactly what the society does to an individual. Society always tries to mould an individual into the way they typecast an average person to be. However, in the process, the individuality of the person is lost. Today, you come across so many engineers and doctors. However, if you ask them what inspired them to take up Engineering or Medicine, most often than not, the answer will be societal pressure. Very few people would have taken up the field for the love of it and they would be among those few who are successful in their lives. The sole reason for that success is that they chose what they wanted to take. And others end up changing their field and getting somewhere else because they never liked their chosen field at the first place and end up just getting miserable with their own life and the society. In such cases, if the person had chosen what they actually wanted to do as their career path, they would have been so much happier in life, if not successful. But then, success is always a relative term. As T.S. Elliot had said

“Success is relative. It is what we make of the mess we have made of things.”

Life is like a supermarket. You will come across a lot of possibilities to add in life. There will be innumerable options available. However, just like in supermarket you cannot buy everything you see, similarly in life, you cannot choose everything that comes your way. There will always be a lost opportunity, no matter how hard you try. But is the lost opportunity worth the grabbed opportunity or not? That is the deciding factor.

Life does not have a manual to live. It is all what experience teaches us that helps us decide our next course of action. More the experience, clearer our options, and more reliable our decisions shall always be. At the end, all that will matter is how much you have lived and how much you have lost. If the list of how much we have lived is longer than how much we have lost, then we can safely pass on to our next journey. That is all that matters. The End.