Predestination or Destination?

 Predestination. Predetermination. Fate. Luck. Karma. Destiny. Free will. Coincidence. Serendipity. God’s Will (with a Capital ‘W’).

What are all these concepts? What do they mean? Who invented them? More to the point, why were they invented? Because they were invented. By someone. Someone who lived on this earth with a desire to make sense of what they were experiencing. Perhaps they had a discussion with a friend who was also determined to make some sense of what they were experiencing. And so on.

The trouble is that each person’s experience is individual, unique, irreplicable (is that even a word?). Not at all like a science experiment, which can be replicated, and by which we end up (mostly) with a new understanding and further knowledge of something scientific. 

However, concepts like those itemised above, while enjoying a dictionary definition, carry nuances and connotations such that they almost become shape-shifters. 

'What’s your point?’ I hear you ask.

I was thinking about death recently. My own. One tends to do more of that when that milestone called Seventy (the new Sixty, so they say) is reached and passed. A very weird feeling came over me as I told myself that no one knows when they will die, so why think too much about it. I reasoned that it was a waste of time doing that. So if I died tomorrow, not very much waste there. But if I died in twenty-five years, that’s a pretty large chink of time right there. Wasted thinking about it. My death, I mean.

Okay. So my next thought was: Nevertheless, Ernie, there is a moment of time in the future that is the moment, is it not? Objectively, there will be a precise, identifiable moment. Does that mean it is predetermined? Does that mean, that no matter how I spend my life from now on, that moment is still etched in a future time or does it change? Obviously not, I thought. That moment, from the perspective of quantum time and space, remains the same. A family member, say, still alive AFTER that moment, will be able to note that time with precision. As it was with my mother - 2.20pm on Friday 17th of March, 2023. I witnessed that moment. 

However, that moment occurred because she made many decisions for herself well before that, so how could it have been predetermined or even predestined? Yet before that, no one had any idea about it, least of all her.

I wondered whether it's better to fill the rest of the time I have left with a squillion things to achieve, do and say, repair and revise or just live the days as they come, and, therefore, not get in everything I think might be vitally important for me to have lived a full, wonderful, masterful life when my moment arrives?

Wow, I said to myself. What a question. (I actually said something else … out loud.)

And then there’s God’s Will (Don’t get me started). On one level it's the ultimate dictatorship, and yet, on another, it opens a door to the seep concept (another one) of discernment. No God, just me. I’ll leave that to you to nut out if you want, but I find it a comforting idea.

Is my life headed to a specific destination at which I will arrive when I die? Could that be only one possible destination among many? Does the path continue after it has been reached, or am I destined to start again, as Stephen King intimated in his epic western saga “The Dark Tower”? Is what I am deciding now changing anything about that moment? No. But it is changing the path I take. The film “Sliding Doors”, while "Hollywood-ised”, helped me understand the nature both of the consequences of our decisions and how past sliding door moments directly impact the present, while we have absolutely no idea that this might be possible.

On the one hand, my moment waits in the future, patient, knowing. On the other, it is unknowable by me so it becomes meaningless, non-existent.

Those few of you who make the time and effort to read my ramblings here will know that I like exploring ideas. This is another such adventure.