Philosophical Potpourri - Chapter 1

The other day I was having a casual chat with Palak about some topics with regards to philosophy and psychology. Psychology, because that's her major subject and I too take interest in psychology, and philosophy because we both love discussing abstract ideas. And it's difficult to find people who can listen to your abstract ideas, not try to force their ideas on you, show that whatever he/she thinks is absolutely proper and you know zilch...... in short, have a healthy discussion on philosophy.

Midway through our discussion, she popped up a question - "Do you believe in destiny? If things go bad in a person's life, who is responsible - destiny or his/her wrong decisions ?" Wow!!! What a question!! Wonderful to talk or debate upon. I did try to justify my answer in concise version. But I'd like to talk about it in length out here.

I believe that destiny plays a role in person's life, but to an extent. As put forth by Palak, destiny is only in the part where a certain event is not in our hands, e.g. like being born in the family that you are. It comprises of things that happen to you until you can make your own decisions. Rest is all your decisions that affect your life, and life's trajectory in a particular direction.

I feel an event, e.g. meeting someone in your life, is like a probabilistic event turning out to be true. From there, it's up to you to decide the outcome of the event based on your acts or decisions. People call an event like that as destiny. We were destined to meet, I was destined to get this job, I was destined to be present at this place at this time, etc. Destiny for me is probability. Probability of two people meeting up is true when both the person happen to be present at the same place at the same time. It's the constraints that make an event happen in a particular way that we feel whatever happened was a rare case and doesn't occur to everyone everyday. The probability of you getting a job is the product of probability of vacancy at a particular company, the probability of you looking for one in the same time duration, the probability of you reading that advertisement in that time frame, and the probability of you performing good at the interview process.

We tend to label the probabilities as 'luck' as well. "I performed bad at the interview today. Generally this doesn't happen to me. Tough luck today." But here, the probability of you performing good or bad is not 0.5 each. Your confidence level, your attitude, your way of tackling things decides what percentage of probability falls under success and what percentage falls under failure. All of this leads up to an outcome of an event. The moment your attitude changes, the probabilities change.

Once any event has occurred, its up to you to decide its outcome. It's your decisions that will affect the course of your future. If destiny was to shape that as well, then men would have just accepted themselves the way they are, and would have never tried to think or go outside their society-defined-boundaries. If men were destined to walk on earth, then the idea of flying would have stayed as a wild fantasy. But men challenged the concept of destiny and decided to change the 'impossible' notion of flying into a possible one. And after several futile attempts, they succeeded.

Same is the case with life. If you accept life, your attitude, your habits, as a destiny, then your future isn't bright. If people think that what you are is your destiny, then you shall never be able to improve yourself. If you see 'the-better-you' as a far- fetched dream, then you shall never be able to achieve that state, which is not impossible to attain, only a li'l difficult. And that's because you've to break out of your mental mould and see things from a completely different perspective and accept them. If you manage doing so, then you'll realize the difference between what destiny is what it is not.

Anyways, I know I'm getting way too abstract for you guys to comprehend it all. So without getting much into more elaboration of my idea, I shall end it here. Your thoughts on the same topic are most welcome.