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My brain starts feeling like it might explode if I start thinking about it too much or too deeply. Maybe that's why people came up with the whole notion of Fate - it's too scary to think that nothing happens for a reason and our lives and encounters are all just totally random and are only what we make out of them.
Fate is a nice idea if your life is going well. One of the things that makes me disinclined to fully believe in fate is when I look at other peoples lives - not my own. So far in life I have been very lucky. I was born to good, middle-class parents in a safe country that gave me a lot of opportunities. Personally to me, nothing bad has ever happened. Yes, I have lost good friends which touched me deeply, but in this whole Fate conversation, they are periphery. I came into contact with them and I loved them dearly as friends and people... but I digress. I will come back to them later. I had a happy childhood, an uneventful teenage-hood. I have not yet been struck by any serious physical or mental illness even though the latter runs in my family, and my sister had suffered from the former. I have had many opportunities to travel. First when I was 10 and we lived for 7 months in Kiribati a third world tropical island. It opened my eyes to how other people could live, and how much simpler life could be and that yes we can survive without TV or electricity or freezers and phones. When I was 16 i was able to go on exchange to Japan and live in Tokyo for a year. Again it opened my eyes to how other people lived. This time the opposite spectrum to Kiribati. While I learned to live without electricity there, in Tokyo I learned how amazingly advanced we are becoming with technology and how we can live with it and expand our experiences with it. I feel like Australia and Canada are 5 -10 years behind Japan when it comes to technology in the general population, and I'd love to go back to see what they're up to now.
Every single person that is important to me in my life I met my random chance. If I or other people had made slightly or majorly different choices. My own existence is so fucking random. My parents randomly met at a party that my mum nearly didn't even go to. Four years later they got married, two years after that I came along. They planned to have 3 or 4 kids, and they got three. Bec, Jen and Nick. But it could have so easily been a different Bec, Jen and Nick (or even an Andrew, Tom and Elizabeth if we reversed the sexes of the babies) if a different sperm had fertilized the egg, or if Grandma had have rung while they were about to get frisky and they had to delay it. Boggles the mind.
If I choose to believe in Fate to be the reason that my life has turned out pretty darn good so far, then how can Fate correlate with Kate & Daryl, how does fate correlate with all those people living in poverty, who get fucked over, have fucked up lives, get murdered, all that horrible shit that goes on in this world. Fate only works when your life is "blessed". When you're not born into a war-torn country and watch your mother get raped and stabbed and then get your head chopped off at the age of six. When you're not born to a mother who murdered your father then kills you when you 13 months old by throwing you into the ocean and drowning you. Fate is a lovely, reassuring idea when your life is going grand, or when something amazing happens. Not when something shit happens. Why would it be fate and destiny for Daryl to die in a car accident when he was 18. Why would it be fate for Keenan and Sarah's friend Kyle to be struck by a falling tree branch and fall off a cliff when he was 17. It doesn't make sense. Yes, people learn from those experiences. Learn how to live each day like it's your last with no regrets - but why would we have to make such a big sacrifice? Why do people turn to religion at times of great grief? I guess then they have someone to blame - the devil.
If Kate and Daryl and Sarah had've gotten to that intersection a minute later than they did they would probably be alive today. But they didn't. If Kyle and his mates had been standing a metre to the left, he would be alive. So many IF's.
Fate? I don't think so. Yes it's scary to face the fact that life is just all random fucking chance. I was not fated to meet Keenan, but I did and I am so grateful that I did. Grateful to who? I don't know. Grateful to the random events that led up to it? Random chance led to two of my best mates being killed way before their time. I hate that. Random chance led me to meet some fantastic people who I love dearly, it also made me miss out on meeting others.
I sometimes think about all the forks and paths that I could have followed in my life... and wonder what my life would be like today if I had followed them. Some small, some big. What would I be doing if I had chosen a different university? What is I had chosen Alex over Ivan in 2007? What if I hadn't gone on my trip? What if I hadn't met Scott? Would I still have come to Canada to meet Keenan? Probably not. Who am I missing out on knowing that I would have if I had've stayed in Melbourne and gone back to uni last year?
So many what if's. It's kind of interesting to think about, but ultimately pointless. Things happened the way they did, I made the choices I did, other people made their choices and that's the world we live in today.
