Is life fated?

I CAN still remember the footage of a harrowing incident in Penang where a car was rammed into the ground by a falling concrete column, killing the driver.

You’d agree had the car been travelling five seconds faster, it would have avoided the accident. It was as if the tragedy was deliberately arranged to occur at that moment, at that place, and in that manner. That’s why when things like that happen, it tempts us to believe that life is fated.

But is this really so?

As a matter of fact, all of us do believe in fate of one kind or another. For example, we believe we’re fated to die one day. That’s a fact nobody disputes. But this kind of belief is not what I’m talking about here. It’s the idea that life is pre-ordained.

For example, if we’re poor, we resign ourselves to the fact that we’re fated to be poor. If a young man strikes a million-prize lottery, we say it’s his fate to become a millionaire. When hundreds of people are killed in a building collapse, we regretfully say it’s their fate to die.

It’s like everything that happens in this world is fated. We see events as stories unfolding according to what has been decreed in the book, and nobody can do anything about them — like a movie that runs according to script.

Nonetheless, one nagging question is do people seriously believe in fate? And that they have no control over whatever will happen? Even for the next moment? This question becomes all the more quizzical, especially if we look at how people ordinarily behave.

For instance, we’d notice people looking left and right first before crossing a street. Here we can see they do seem to intuitively know their life is in their own hands and not in the hands of fate, otherwise why would they bother to first check whether or not the street is safe to cross?

Here’s a true story I’d like to share. Some years ago, during an office afternoon tea break, a colleague of mine who came back from having just seen a fatal road accident, declared vociferously: “Sigh! Life is fated! Whatever will happen, will happen and nobody can do anything about it.”

Right after saying that, his handphone rang. His boy, after an activity in school, called to say he was ready to be picked home.

“Oh, I need to rush,” blurted out that colleague of mine.

“That devil, if I don’t pick him immediately, he can just lepak with his friends and anything can happen to him. The world’s so dangerous nowadays.”

You see, he had just declared nobody could do anything about anything that would happen, yet he hurried off to do something to stop what he feared might happen. Action contradicting words?  He’s not alone. All of us are like that. But how to explain such a conflict of intellect?

Let me try.

1.            Perhaps consciously, we

believe in fate but

subconsciously we don’t.

2.            We don’t, in fact, realise we

actually don’t believe in fate.

3.            We believe in fate but when

a real threat looms, our raw

sensibility takes over. I’m

more inclined to think of

the third one as the more likely

answer. In any case, it does

seem that many of us who

believe in fate, don’t, in fact,

want to really bother to think

more deeply into the subject

matter. Why our brains

seem to loathe wading into this

subject is probably because the

idea everything that

happens in this world is fated,

is undeniably burdened with

myriads of vexing questions

because they’re questions

nobody can offer any

satisfactory answers to. Time

and luxury to discuss them

all here, we don’t have. But a

sneak peek into a few of the

more ordinary and superficial

ones may be in order.

Master Fate and his work

The first one is if we want to believe life is fated, it should also mean we have to believe everything that happens in this world is fated as well. That, in turn, should mean all things that happen in this world would have been pre-arranged to happen in the ways they happen.

If that’s the case, then there must be a fate planner to make all the things happen according to plan. Otherwise, how can those dumb individual things by themselves know how to coordinate with one another to happen according to plan?

For ease of discussion, let’s just name our hypothetical fate planner Master Fate. But,alas, accepting the existence of a Master Fate dooms us to confront the more curious question as to why the many plans Master Fate makes often seems utterly senseless. For example, if a house catches fire and burns little children to death,why would Master Fate want such a horrible thing to happen? What more to say f we try to think about all the sad things that happen in the world — natural disasters, wars, accidents, murders, robberies, rapes, diseases, body deformities, violence, family problems, poverty and so on and so forth.

Why the heck would Master Fate want to encumber himself by planning all these cruel and seemingly purposeless things? For what? It’s, in fact, an outrageously enormous and is even an apparently impossible task to have to arrange for everything to happen in the ways they happen.

To illustrate what I mean, let me share another story for us to think a bit. One morning in Miri, I met this friend of mine. He was trotting jauntily to a bank when I spotted him. I accosted him and pulled him into a coffeeshop for a drink.

While we were chatting, we heard a boom some distance away which we later learned was an explosion in a bank caused by a gas leak that resulted in nine injuries and one death.

The next day when my friend stumbled upon me again, he confessed: “Benson, you saved my life yesterday. If you didn’t invite me for coffee, I’d be already right inside the bank when the explosion occurred and that could have killed me. I’m sure it’s already in the book you and I were to bump into each other yesterday morning.”

His statement drove me into a deep thinking. I tried to fathom the complexity of Master Fate’s task of having to organise all the events that would eventually lead to me to saving my friend’s life. You see, just by looking at that incident per se and solely from perspective in solo, I could already figure out many correlating circumstances that calibrated with one another to culminate in me bumping into my friend that morning.

For instance, if I had not paused to watch several sparrows fighting over some spilled corn grains on a roadside, I’d have walked past and away from the spot where I met my friend. And if someone the previous evening had not paid me RM300 to make me a little richer, I’d have pretended I didn’t see my friend that morning. If my daughter had not asked me to buy her a box of colour pencils to replace one she had lost, I’d not have gone to town that morning for coffee.

Well, I could go on and on till the cows come home ferreting out all the incidents that caused me to meet my friend. And what about incidents from my friend’s side? And those of my daughter? And the birds? And those that led to the gas explosion?

Imagine how much work Master Fate would have to handle to arrange for all the events to play out coordinatively in razor-sharp precision just to conform to his set out plans! What more to say if we take into account the fact that every single eventis infinitely traceable further and further back into other past — even to the beginning of time.

It’s obvious we can see every single situation in time has an infinite history behind it — something like every fate is a product of another fate.

Talking about the product of fate reminds me of yet another story. There was this teen-age girl (let’s just call her Little Amoi) who bitterly hated the ex-wife of her father. Amoi had heard of all the bad things the woman did to her father to the extent that he eventually divorced her.

One day Amoi accidentally met the woman (let’s call the woman Big Amoi) at a home party of their mutual friend. At one point at the buffet table when the two females’ eyes met, Big Amoi said to Little Amoi: “Hey! Don’t gawk at me like that, girl. I know you hate me because I was bad to your daddy. But if I had been good to him, you wouldn’t have been born into this world, would you?”

For a moment, Little Amoi was numbed out of her wits, wondering what in the name of hell the woman was talking about. But ruminating further, she got the point. Big Amoi was insinuating that it was because of her being bad to Little Amoi’s father that he divorced her and thus married another woman and then produced Little Amoi. So was Little Amoi a product of fate? Poor girl, what a dilemmatic thought for her!

For sure, we are all born — and thanks to a kaleidoscope of circumstances that led to our birth. But were all those circumstances pre-arranged just so that we were born? I guess, fortune tellers would think so. After all, they’re the ones who also proclaim we can read fate lines in our palms. If that’s the case, one curious question I’d like to think about is — Did all, for example, the more than 200,000 people who died in the Aceh tsunami had the same fate lines in their palms that foretold of the same tragedy?

Coincidence or arrangement?

Let’s explore further. In the ordinary sense, we know what a coincidence, an accident or cause and effect is.

If I met you at Stutong Market last Sunday, that was a coincidence. Nothing would really prompt you to think the incident was a fate. But if I tripped over a stone and you dashed over to catch me and then you unfortunately plunged into a drain and broke your nose, then someone may tell you that you are fated to break that nose of yours.

The question to ask is if the incident was fated, then at what point did the element of fate step into the picture? Don’t forget any slight change in the course of events would have thwarted the chance for you to break your nose. My point here is that if your falling into the drain and breaking your nose was fated, then all the preceding events should also have been fated.

The same applies to every happening. A car accident, for instance, should also have all the preceding happenings arranged for it to happen because it’s an affair of one thing leading to another — a continuity in which no part can be singled out as fated or not fated. It’s either everything is fated or nothing is fated

But then, seeing everything as being fated would bring us back to the earlier status quo of accepting the existence of a Fate Master. So now, it seems the only way forward is foregoing the belief things are fated.

Only then, we’d be free to see happenings as occurring according to the laws of nature; free to see happenings as the result of a myriad of factors like coincidences, accidents, chances, timing, situations, conditions, environments, emotions, temperatures, weather — the list goes on. Here at last, we can visualise a world of reality where causes and effects operate, and logics and common sense prevail.

Chance, accident and coincidence

I always view chance and accident like husband and wife who never divorce. This couple have a child known as coincidence. The three are inseparable as a small family.

It’s always by chance that an accident happens and it happens due to a coincidence. Accident doesn’t necessarily mean a bad happening. Striking a 4-digit ticket is a form of accident. People buy a winning number by accident. After all, there’s always a 0.0023 per cent chance for striking a number out of a 23-number set. That’s not even up to one per cent chance but still the chance is there, and it can happen.

This sort of window of opportunity can also be illustrated like this. If you lob a tennis ball onto a crowd of people, the ball is likely to hit someone’s head. Which head gets hit is a matter of chance determined by the force and the direction of the ball’s throw. No one in the crowd has been pre-arranged or fated to get hit, right?

Likewise, we can also say if a man dies of a heart attack, it’s the consequence of his poor health. That’s already the reason he dies. Need we dole out another reason by saying his death is fated? Yea, I know we’ve the tendency to do so. That could be due to our inherent aversion to the inevitability of death. So if we can attribute it to something that’s fated, we’d feel better, won’t we? Psychologically.

Robotic world?

Another point we need to concede is if we were to regard everything as fated, it would then be tantamount to denying the existence of the laws of nature. Let me give an example. The mechanism of a spoon falling from a dining table and the mechanism a man falling from a roof both operate basically under the same laws of nature. In other words, both falls are affected by the pull of gravity following some accidental dislodgement of the objects from their initial positions. But if we regard the fall of the man as fated, it would also mean we’ve to regard the fall of the spoon as fated.

What? Even a spoon has fate? If we still think so, then what about the laws of nature that cause the spoon to fall? Deny that they exist? See my point?

Finally, another question to think about is if we were to

regard every happening as fated, then what about the choices we make? Are our choices also

fated? If so, then they’re not choices but fated decisions, right? If that’s the case, we’d, thus, have to accept life and all its complexities are nothing more than a machine-driven existence — meaning, we’re actually just like robots being driven around by a computer software programme written by a programmer.

Can we accept such a notion? Can we accept the idea we’re actually programmed robots living in a programmed world? You decide.

But, oops! Silly me — how can you decide if your mind is programmed?