Of all the questions we pose for ourselves or those we ask of others - where, what, when, how, for example - are almost always straightforward; however, "what happens next" is the only one filled with anticipation, suspense, and often a cloud of mystery.
An infant is easily bored once any new stimuli gets old because from the moment the baby is used to experiencing new information often, his or her brain braces for what is new all the time. Long before the baby understands what is past and present, he or she is somehow more stimulated by what is about to happen, oblivious to the other tenses of time. That is why peek-a-boo is one of their easiest sources of amusement.
We get to adulthood and "what happens next" remains one of the most interesting questions we ask even in instances when we kind of know what is next. That is because we are never sure until it happens. Yet, we are also somehow pulled into believing in the certainty of fate even when we believe that we are capable of free will. How is that?
The French has a phrase, "fait accompli".
Fait accompli, pronounced "fate uh-COM-plee," describes something that has already happened, or been done and cannot be changed; presumably irreversible.
As word origins go, fait is not the root word for faith. Neither for fate. But they all seem to be correlated with each other. That is perhaps because faith is about believing in something without a need for proof while fate always connotes as something that cannot be changed.
But what about free will?
Well, by each definition of the word and word phrase, fate and free will are made mutually exclusive of each other. That is the quandary we face - the futility of not being able to do anything outside of the script that is written for each of us or the risk and uncertainty one faces for the potential for misdirection or misstep as a result of free will.
Now, I think there is a way. It would first mean that we must believe that fate and free will though both can be true are not necessarily exclusive of each other. Bear with me.
Fate - the script for each individual is a draft written at birth, a function of the circumstances of who the parents are, that include their social status and origin. Free will is the ability of the individual, over time and through determined and unrelenting effort, to rewrite the script.
I wrote on July 24, 2018, "...It would be Curling" as a metaphor for life after the Olympic winter sport curling. We are familiar with the images of the sport where one player releases the stone forward along the ice where two teammates sweep ahead of the sliding stone to influence and change its direction towards the target.
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I wrote then:
Imagine, we are the stones traveling along the path of life. Whatever our stations in life, privileged by birth, or plagued by misfortunes of destitution and abject poverty, we are all equally driven by desire to get somewhere - a target position of more wealth and prestige or merely a place a little more comfortable or a little less wanting of the basic necessities of life, and perhaps a yearning for just a little bit more than what we have now. Whatever the place we dream about, the path may not always be smooth. It could be a little rough for some, more pebbly or discouragingly rocky for others. Just as in the sport, there are "ice technicians" sprinkling layers of obstacles in our path. The ice technicians could be other people not wanting us to succeed or circumstances we find ourselves in, that we need to overcome. But we were not to be deterred from reaching the place...
...If we're fortunate to reach that place, we look back and realized that as we sled through much of the journey, someone or many others had swept the ice in front of us. Parents were the first sweepers in front of their children's path for years before sons and daughters realize the amount of energy, worry and anguish it took to get those brooms working. What little they know about how frantic at times their parents had to sweep in front, sometimes hollering and screaming (as what happens in the sport of curling), because they didn't want them to go astray of that "5-meter-wide-lane" and target. There are two sweepers in curling, one to each side of the stone. A single sweeper faces the daunting task of single parenting. Doing the sweeping from either side of the stone is twice as hard and the rare but laudable successes of single parents deserve twice the acclaim.
And so we read stories like that of Booker T. Washington and so many others who rose above the circumstances they were born in. They successfully re-wrote the script written for them. Of course, there seems to be as many stories of many who were born in the midst of the upper social status and circumstances who managed to squander untold opportunities by rewriting the script written for them in the penmanship of a downward spiral.
Those are what I call up-scripting and down-scripting (terms I created) the drafts (fates) written for every individual. It is akin to each of us being handed a script at birth and along the way we manage to make changes here and there and with the help of sweepers (again, like in curling) in front of us and the power of our own free will, the draft is re-written. We managed with our free will the ability to determine, "What Happens Next" at each page of the draft.
This is perhaps a simplified view, even naive, but if we rely on fate and fate alone, the air of resignation would seem palpable as to make any of our efforts to be for naught. A life that cannot rise above the futility of a "fait accompli" would indeed not be worth striving for.
This is a micro look into the life of an individual but what about in the macro world of accidents, catastrophic disasters, wars, world events beyond our control, etc.? What do we make of that? That will be for another musing. Meanwhile, I leave the reader with this: In the scale of the entire universe, where even our entire solar system where a million earths would fit inside our sun, the entire patch of where we are is lost in the glare of the entire galaxy; our galaxy a medium size patch in a trillion patches that make up one incomprehensibly massive world only a Divine Creator can conceive.
The reader may want to read "..It Must Be Curling" for additional insight into fate and free will (and know a little bit more about the Olympic sport of curling (copy link below into your search bar and click):
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