Was I destined to write this?

Fate. Destiny. The grand design. The belief that despite the fact we seem to make our own decisions and shape our own lives that perhaps there is a greater hand at work choosing our paths for us.

Even 'the benefit of hindsight' suggests a certain admission that things are out of our control. When we look back at some choice or experience and say “If only I had known this is where it would take me...” or “I knew at that moment everything would be different...” 

Or when the perfect job, pair of shoes, lover, seem to appear in a our lives at the perfect moment. Life is at once changed forever and glowing with the appearance of what is “meant to be”. 

How else can we explain the simultaneous and intermingling lives of billions of people across the world? Every life is both unique and part of the whole. There has to be some amount of control, whether it is a higher power pulling the puppet strings of our lives, or something of our own creation. A billion people making millions of decisions at exactly the same time every single day, yet there is some method to the madness, some connectedness in the chaos, and yes some destruction amongst a field of daisies.

Can life be a convergence of both the fated and the chosen? Of destiny and dream?

If you choose one path and not the other, is that the choice that was meant to happen? Were you destined to choose that path no matter what? It is what happened, so in this life and this plane of existence yes, it was meant to be; it is here. 

Is there a grand design? Each one of us facing life choices daily, some people living through an excruciating existence to the point that one may wonder 'Well what's the point? Why must a person be destined to live a life of horror, deprivation and heinous death?' 

Those that are taken from us before their time, through disease and fatal accidents, was this their path? Their destiny? What God or greater being would deign them that fate? How does man-kind benefit? How mysterious must God's ways work to put human kind through some of the things that it has both survived and perished by?

Some would say that man-kind has created this world. Through its collective decisions and actions, through free-will. This thinking would imply that nothing is meant to be and everything is a consequence of a previous thought or action – which is logical indeed – and every bad or good thing in our lives is a result of our own making. 

These thoughts bring with it a sense of control, that we can shape our lives and our potential future has a ceiling of limitation created only by the power of our minds.

Do you think that life is more fated that coincidence? Do opportunities land in your lap and events and experiences pop up in your life that just seem so well timed that something larger than us is guiding and shaping our lives?

These chances we are given that put a fork in the road, is that destiny giving us a choice? Or is destiny playing her own game, already knowing which path we will choose? 

I like to think that I own my own life, and that I choose where I do and do not go. But so many things have happened in my life, good and bad, to make me think that from birth, I was one day destined to write this to you.

Whatever the truth may be, if Destiny is playing her game with me, the journey is a blast, and I can't wait to see where she will take me next.