Role of destiny in life

Neeraj Dubey
I believe in Destiny & I personally feel it is what God has pre-decided for you at the time of your birth. No one can change your destiny. What is destined is going to happen! Good or bad, you have to go through it. However, the choice is yours. You can either accept things happily or sadly. Better to have a Happy & Positive attitude in bad times because nothing lasts forever & so holds true for bad times as well. Destiny is not in a person’s hands as many of your friends have written. Only hard work is in your hands & after lots of hard work you may not succeed! What do you call it then? you work harder more still same results. So, there is someone up there who has a full control of your life which I call destiny.

Take life as it comes! God sees a person through bad times. He teaches you tolerance & lots of patience, I agree fully with you on this. Destiny can never be changed whatever you might try. Life is full of ups & downs & these are predestined. Our choices do predict our future but destiny has an upper hand. I am also asked this question often, “if there is destiny, then where is the question of a free will? The fact of the matter is that God has provided the infrastructure to man in the form of life support system and the different situations that present themselves to man. This is the destiny part of the matter. Man is; however, free to respond to all these different situations, as he likes. That is his free will or his freedom of choice. In this aspect, he is completely free. Therefore, I say that the matter is 50-50. The destiny plays a 50 percent role, as man cannot change the infrastructure provided to him. Free will plays the remaining 50 percent role, as man is completely free to respond to the situations the way he likes. This freedom has opened doors of two kinds for man, one leading to success and the other to failure. If, on receiving freedom an individual becomes arrogant and insolent, it will mean that he has failed to pass the test. But if on the other hand, he remains modest and humble, bowing to his Lord’s will on all occasions, he will have made the right use of his God-given freedom: he will, without any compulsion, have bound himself by divine principles. One who chooses this course will succeed in the test of freedom. He will be handsomely rewarded by God as no other creature. Held to be the chosen servant of God, he will remain in an everlasting state of blissfulness and blessedness in the eternal world of paradise. One of the greatest and everlasting debates of humanity has been about the role of destiny in the lives of human beings. There was a time when it was almost an accepted fact of life that each and every event was governed by destiny of human beings. Astrology was considered a science. Then with the advent of modern times the importance of role of destiny as a concept started losing weight. Today, belief in destiny is considered a superstition by majority of people. And rightly so, since there seems to be no evidence for the irrevocability of destiny. There are three schools of thoughts about fate. The most prevalent these days seems to be the one which says that there is nothing called destiny or fate. This line of thinking says that human beings do possess free will. All our successes, failures and actions are governed by the decisions we take. If we take correct decisions and act accordingly, no one can prevent us from achieving what we want to. If we fail, it must be due to something wrong on our part. We have the option to take decisions using our free will. In this line of thinking, fate is considered a superstition at worst and at best one can regard it as a psychological defense system to cope with the failures in life. Whenever you fail in some endeavor or whenever something happens which is not in accordance of your wish, you use it as a convenient scapegoat. You say, it was your bad luck which caused you to fail. Otherwise, how could you fail? You are never ready to accept that it was you who was responsible for the failure. It may have been due to some bad planning, lack of efforts in the right direction or outright failure to correctly judge the realities of your goal.
But since it hurts to accept that you were the one who committed the mistake, you take shelter behind the concept of fate and blame it on your karma. This relieves you of the terrible pain of knowing and accepting the defeat. Does destiny is in our own hands, the saying goes. But how far this is true is a moot question indeed! where there is a will, there is a way’ goes the adage, but how practical is it in today’s context is something that is to be scrutinized threadbare. Hard work and perseverance are the two keys to success. We can shape our own destiny by hard work and perseverance. But, what if we don’t succeed even after working hard and persevering? I don’t want to sound pessimistic though, but let me put forth some moot points before I’ve often felt and believed that we can shape our destiny to our liking, by hard work and perseverance. But, when I don’t succeed even after working hard I lose faith in these values and feel that the destiny has something else in store for me and we are just slaves to it. I feel that no matter however hard we work and persevere, destiny controls us and our future and we are bound to follow it. When we don’t succeed even after working hard to achieve our most cherished and coveted goal(s), we feel that the destiny does not want us to become what we wanted to become. There is then a shift of ambition and focus. We have a try at other things and when we finally do succeed and settle in something else, then we feel, perhaps this is what the destiny wanted to make me and wanted me to pursue . But, on the other hand, I feel all this talk of destiny and believing in it blindly are the signs of a weak-minded person who wants to avoid his responsibilities. A strong person will brave every storm of the destiny, come what may, to achieve his goals! He’ll not (and should not) merely accept what destiny has to offer him. He’ll fight for what he wants for himself from. There goes a saying “Shallow men believe in luck, strong men believe in cause and effect.”
This holds very true of persons who believe in themselves and in the values of hard work and perseverance. Just because you didn’t get something or couldn’t achieve your cherished goal, even after a lot of hard work and perseverance you shouldn’t settle for something inferior, which you may feel the destiny has to offer you or has offered you! Always be a fighter and fight until your last breath for accomplishing your dreams.
This is a world of cut-throat and ruthless competition. Remember, in this world there is no place for quitters because “Winners never quit and quitters never win.”
(The author is Asst Professor, GCET Jammu)

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