Who rides you – Destiny or Will Power?

It matters not how strait the gate,

How charged with punishments the scroll,

I am the master of my fate,

I am the captain of my soul.

These powerful lines by the great poet William Ernest Henley always motivate me to steer through the battlefield of life. The ups and downs, come whatever may be, the undying spirit of my soul always helps me in tiding over the waves of difficulty leading to a new transformation. Life is more like a crossword puzzle where you activate the grey cells of your mind, to fit in the best alternative to complete it. Your life is a testimony to so many life changing events that you hardly recognize how many of it were initiated by you and how many of them just occurred to you. Things change sometimes without you having any inkling of it, going through a lot of mess, leaving you numbed, dumbed & stumped. There are certain things in life over which we have no control, they just happen and this is where I feel what really rides us – destiny or will power?

A fair & common example is love, isn’t it? You fall in for someone, who is just another person you know on this earth or a stranger may be, but eventually becomes an important part of your life (barring few exceptions). You don’t realize when and why you start developing feelings for a person. With time things change and you miss the person in your life (happy realization!) eventually falling in love. Don’t you think it’s destiny? Isn’t it destined for two hearts to meet, a divine grace? You can control your mind for will power but heart I’ve always felt, you don’t have much control over. I mean c’mon you just can’t tell your heart to stop beating for someone. Anyway before I digress from the topic (spare me that love snooze) we were talking about destiny & will power. Life is actually a beautiful play between destiny and will power and this connection is divine!

Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love stated in her book that “Destiny is a relationship - a play between divine grace & willful self-effort”. I agree to it. Life is a strange game, half of it you have no control over, half of it is absolutely in your hands, & your actions will show measurable consequence. How many times we keep cribbing on something that didn’t work out? And then we come up with our own excuses like “I think it’s not in my destiny…sigh...!”. “I know it’s not gonna work out, why should I waste my time?” Ain’t we familiar with these sentences? We love blame game (passing the buck!). Destiny no doubt can bring you close to your goal, but it’s always will power that helps you to accomplish things in life.

We are neither entirely a puppet in the hands of the god, nor do we entirely own our destiny, we are a little of both. We run through the madness of life where things keep on changing every minute, all we need to do is keep weighing and balancing the act like performers because life is a play. We can’t worry all the time about things we don’t have control over but we can drive our steely will power to steer through the difficulties. There is so much about our fate that we cannot control, but other things do fall under our jurisdiction. Like we can decide on, how to spend our time, who can we talk & share our thoughts with, who we can share our life with (destiny can only make you meet & fall in love with someone, will power helps in keeping him/her despite difficulties), how to regard unfortunate situations in life (how do you view it - either get through or keep sulking). We can choose our words to speak, our emotions to vent, our thoughts to express, isn’t it?  Ain’t all these things very much in our control?

Yes it is, and it’s great, you do own your life to an extent. What you can’t control just leave it to the “Destiny”. I believe there’s always a reason behind things you experience, you either start trusting someone or something (if it’s a good one) or you get mad at someone or something (if it’s a bad one), but either way you learn and it kinda shakes you, tears you apart, shows you your obstacles and makes you so desperate that you transform your life revealing another layer of yourself to you (self discovery). To sum it up all – Have a determined life with the ever changing destiny!