Some musings about fate.

[00:00:00] **Aurooba Ahmed:** Well, hello! This is The Daily Five with Aurooba, that's me, where we reflect on creating our best lives a little bit every day. Here we go.

[00:00:16] I found myself in a conversation about fate today. I think fate and people's belief about fate are interesting. Some people will tell you we make our own futures. Our own fates. Others will tell you everything is already written. Even more people will tell you that the big moments are written, but everything else is up to you.

[00:00:43] I remember this old story my mom once told me. I think it's a pretty popular one. We often tell it a little bit like a joke with a point, and I think there is a word for that, but I don't remember what that is right now. The story goes, there was this man, and every night he would diligently pray and say, Oh God, please, please, please let me win huge in the lottery, or something to that effect.

[00:01:10] And every day he would do good things, try to be a good person, and he would pray reverently and fervently for this one thing. But it never came true. And then one night, God got so tired and frustrated that as the man was praying, God appeared and said, Son, please, please, please, buy a lottery ticket. As a kid, that story would always make us chuckle.

[00:01:35] The moral being that you can you know, pray for all the things in the world, but if you don't try to take some action towards those things, God, the universe, whatever larger force you believe in, doesn't have enough to work with. You play a role in it too. Sometimes when we console ourselves when an opportunity passes us by, or we missed something that we thought was great.

[00:01:58] We say, you know, if it's meant to be, it'll be. The different beliefs about fate are all around us. As an adult, when I hear that story about the man and the lottery ticket, some flippant part of me wants to say, well, if God really wanted to make it happen, God could have just put a random lottery ticket in the man's path and compelled him to pick it up.

[00:02:20] But of course, that would destroy the point of the story. So, whatever your beliefs about fate, nothing that happens to us is fully in our control. It happens because of a variety of variables colliding together to bring about a particular situation. The things you can control are some of those variables, for sure, but they aren't all of them.

[00:02:43] That's not a cause for giving up, though. It's not cause for just letting things happen to us. It's acknowledgement that the world and the lives we lead are complicated combinations of a lot of different things. And the things that happen to you, happen to you because of a partnership between your actions and everything else involved.

[00:03:04] Whether that is God, other people, the wind, or a butterfly that flapped its wings a bit oddly halfway across the world. There's always something we can do. We cannot always know if it's enough or not, of course. But we have a hand in what happens to us and to people around us, and sometimes even to people connected to us loosely through other people.

[00:03:27] We are in fact sometimes the uncontrollable variables in other people's lives. So what is fate and why does that even matter? That's the question I was pondering and maybe the answer is that fate is about accepting all of that and trying your hardest anyway. Thanks for listening! Same time tomorrow?