Does fate exist, or are we truly in control of our destiny? Part 2.
Warning: Non-Technical Post
So, the debate, inside my head, continues. Since my last post and the replies I’ve had on Part1, I have gathered even more evidence that fate does exist, and that we are NOT in control of our own destiny or not the whole of it in any case.
Out of the 77 web views the previous entry had, 8 were brave enough to stand up and say: They are in control of their own destinies. Well done guys, please let me know how you escaped The Matrix.
In a philosophical moment, over a lovely glass of Bianco Cabernet Sauv (I can REALLY recommend) I had a chat to someone who majored in psychology. Apparently we are born with something they call constitution, which in plain English means your personality, which is 60% predetermined i.e. dependant on your genes!
Upon watching the movie The Butterfly Effect, I had an extremely interesting conversation with my husband (who is an university graduate in Math, Psychology and Physics). He explained that should a professor in e.g. Math/Physics travel to a dimension where his parents decided that he would be in a walking ring (which by the way effects your mathematical ability), he would not be able to understand the theory to travel back to the dimension he originated from. To defend that, I replied that I was in one of these walking rings, I had math in High School on higher grade, plus I did not do too badly… To which he replied: Exactly, imagine what you could have achieved. Needless to say, I burst out into tears, and had a huge hang over the next day.
The reason I cried wasn’t because I didn’t ace Math in Std 10, it is because I so often feel that I’m running into a wall when writing certain complex code procedures or having to develop algorithms. It is a situation where I understand the concept and I feel I am so close to the solution if I can just break through this damn wall!
I did not have any control over being in a walking ring, nor is it my parents’ fault – they did not know any better, but I was disadvantaged the day they put me in that walking ring.
Furthermore, the psychologist talked about the good and evil inside each one of us. The yin-yang. All of us have it. Good and Evil inside of us. Put to people in exactly the same situation with exactly the same parameters i.e. upbringing, BUT different parents, and they will react to it differently! There is this study they did on identical twins. During the 70’s these identical twins were adopted by different parents (they don’t split twins anymore though). The one twin was brought up by Jewish parents, the other by Muslim parents. Years later, the twins met for the first time. They found that they liked the same kind of things, certain personality or constitutional traits were exactly the same. They made the same jokes, they even had the same liking for certain foods… (secretly they both craved pork …. No, that’s just a joke!).
Another example is information that is available to you. Take someone from a poor rural area, who does not have the necessary information available to him that there are options available for him should he choose to rise above his situation. That there are tertiary institutions etc, something called study loans and bursaries. But because his father died when he was 3 and his mother fell ill when he was 16 and he was the eldest, he had to drop out of school, find a job to provide for his family of 10. His ability is very close to that of someone who grew up in a city, whose parents are both earn a nice income and had the ability to support him to get a PhD in some or the other course. Was the person in the rural town really in control of his own destiny if he did not know of all the options available to him?
I can take this late into the night, but I prefer not to be hung over again tomorrow. Yes, I am in control of certain things, but not about the things that are important. The things that make me who I am.
If you can prove me different – I am open for persuasion.