This may be esoteric or pointless but I got stuck in a trail of thought one night and ended up with an obvious but personally inspiring conclusion. This is long but writing it help settle a bit of silt in my mind. It is writing for me, not necessarily for anyone passing though. A new purpose for my swampy bogspot!

There is a line of thinking that says that there is such a thing as fate. That is, that there are quite strong elements of pre-determination in life, if not total pre-determination. For example, any decision you make is due to the experiences you have had and the circumstances beyond you. Are you not just doing what all the pre-conditions say you will do? You were always going to have the experiences you had because of the situations that preceded it. Even when you feel like you are making a random choice, the number might just be the number that your brain would choose if it had to. Last night, I did try to think of a random number and suddenly thought "132"... which after a moments thought realised was just a number that was raised earlier that night.

Why am I yapping on about this?

I just read in a book of apparent fiction:

"These people (Australian Aborigines) believe everything exists on this planet for a reason. Everything has a purpose. There are no freaks, misfits, or accidents. There are only misunderstandings and mysteries not yet revealed to mortal man."

I thought this was rather interesting and wanted to think about it but it was late and I was in need of sleep. When I tried to sleep, my mind returned to this discussion.

The section of the book contrasted with something James said to me in an e-mail:

"If everything is predetermined, then it gives me an empty feeling about life and existence. How meaningful is anything you do, if you were predestined to do it anyway?"

Pre-determination hits upon all sorts of raw nerves. “Judge, I was always going to steal that car, circumstances meant that it was always ever going to be my only reasonable choice with respect to my state of mind, my past experiences, the air temperature and an a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil”

So, it damages faith in real freedom, meaning and other issues, as illuminated above, like justice.

The statement about aboriginal views of everything having a purpose and reason stirred me a little though. And is still stirring me a little.
For me, I don't have a belief that everything has a purpose, in a fixed way i.e. this book was NOT always meant to be read by me personally, so that I will have a revelation that will lead me down the track to change the world. Sure, there was a purpose to the book, but it was not specific anyone except perhaps the author but not in a “fate” sense for me. It however can be used for “a” purpose. Recreation, enlightenment, paperweight etc. But “the” purpose is undefined.

“Everything happens for a reason.” This sentence could be taken in two ways. The aboriginal way is in the “fate” sense. This is to say, a meaning akin to “The Lord works in mysterious ways”, that all events are part of a master plan. There are some times when life does appear to be doing that. On my birthday 2002, I had a birthday party where I selected the girl to feed me my birthday cake out of a bag at random. There were the names of about 20 girls in that bag and I drew the name Xin, who was to become my girlfriend.

But then you could say that there could be an element of causation there. Did feeding me my birthday cake become a precondition for us becoming close? But soon as we suggest a master plan, there would be implication on something greater considering our getting together to be a “superior” outcome (Or else why?) Having no affiliation with a deistic religion, I can say that I can lay this argument to one side till I have one.

Everything has a reason. The less fate-based interpretation of this sentence is much easier on the brain. It is easy to see that any occurrence has a reason for happening because we already know what the occurrence is.

Everything has a reason. Any accident, intentional or does have a reason for occurring. When I crashed my car into the side of a Morris Minor, while attempting a U-turn on Khyber Pass, I was influenced by tiredness, distraction and the desire to take a suggestion of a friend to go back up the road the other way. The Morris Minor was logically there because the driver needed to go there, maybe circumstances. Two sets of circumstances added up to the collision of motor vehicles. It was no accident (in the sense of being something that shouldn't have happened), although quite unintentional. Accidents are often seen as aberrations. They do not seem to be if we have perfect knowledge.

So is this pre-determination? Was it always going to happen?

A few years ago I had the argument against fate as follows:

“The perspective of fate relies on a perspective that is all-knowing, and that is beyond time. You can only consider the future fixed if you have these two capacities. That is, to be a god. Only those who believe in God/ a god need to worry themselves about the implications of fate (I would suggest to Christian believers that the omniscience of God, if it is not just popular belief that he is, threatens the idea of salvation and damnation). The rest of us have no need to be concerned as it occupies a perspective that is impossible and irrelevant to our existence. Like worrying how we look to a fly. Our equal lack of knowledge is makes us equally ignorant of what all the implications of current actions are so fate is irrelevant to our human lives.”

That was a nice “fend-off” in my agnostic times. A lot of my arguments usually lead to the implication that I didn’t have to think about anything.

But as I said, something jumped into my mind. Our personal agency as one of my lecturers would name it. It is true that every event has reasons that led to it, although the mystery might be what the reasons are exactly. So all one can do is see how their own actions and processes lead to any particular action. We do actively participate in most of the things that affect us.

In the car crash, I know tiredness and distraction led to it. I can see exactly where I went wrong. But there were some things that I did that played an active role in causing it. My choices, attitudes and my subsequent actions, with the background of uncontrolled circumstances, led to the collision.

Between circumstances and fate, we should look at it from the perspective that we are active agents in fate. For any occurrence, we can see our responsibility for them, and if we consider the occurrence adversive, we can do something about it. To take ownership of all things that happen because of us.

It is quite an empowering conclusion, but obvious conclusion.

This loops into my existing values, of responsibility. And late at night where the relevance of any particular issue is hard to see, it was a nice revelation.

I also love the line: “There are no freaks, misfits, or accidents. There are only misunderstandings and mysteries not yet revealed to mortal man." That’s all. You can imagine that sleeping with that in mind, waiting idly to be forgotten is something of a sleep-inhibitor. Thanks for reading, if you are.

P.S. This almost item equals the word count in my recent essay which I struggled to write.