You know how some of us have this tendency to say things like "Just leave it to destiny"; "Let the invisible hand of fate guide us".
Sometimes I feel that during the vicissitudes of life, when things aren't going well for us, we find it easier to blame it on destiny, Divine will or fate. Its a continuation of the age old debate over reconciling Pre-destiny with Free Will: If indeed the Creator chartered a pre-determined course for us, then where does our "free will" feature. If the only thing that distinguishes us from angels is the "free will" granted to us, then what role does our destiny play. Why is it that some people are born in certain families, cultures, societies which pull them away from God whereas others are given the ideal conditions and circumstances to nurture faith? The debate is circular and drifts into infinite loops.
I always loved the idea of flying. One of my favourite video games while growing up was flight simulator or F22-Raptor. I thought what if I could never pursue my dream of flying, atleast for a few moments I could live that dream in the fantasy world of PC games. I learned alot. The games were as close to reality as the technology at that time permitted with real life-like flying situations, emergency landings, navigating through storms and even the flying in hostile territories. I am not drifting off the topic. The reason I mentioned flying is because for me it somehow helped to reconcile free will with pre-destiny in the simplest possible way.
You see, just like a flight, we know where we start from and we kinda sorta know what our ultimate destination is. The basic parameters are already pre-determined and beyond our control: the make and model of the airplane, the airport runway, the weather conditions and so on and so forth. When the airplane takes off, the pilot receives coordinates for navigation, the perfect altitude for cruising, the perfect airspeed to reach the destination at the right time. This is more or less the upbringing and the environment that we get in our formative years. However, in real life pilots experience so many unexpected variables during their flights. Pockets of turbulence, crosswinds, instrument failures, engine failures, low visibility and what not. All these variables "test" the competence and the abilities of the pilot. In the end, it is upto the pilot to use all the resources and skills at his disposal to make sure that the plane lands safely to its "ultimate destin-y-ation". If the pilot sits back and resigns to the fact that the course of the plane is no longer in his control, then not only does the plane lose its course, it is bound to crash. For a single seater plane that would be classified as a suicide but in our case we are all akin to those large passenger liners and as pilots, the lives of so many people depend on us. If we crash and burn, due to our sheer apathy and our resignation to "leave everything to God, destiny and prayers", then we would be held accountable to the Creator on the Chosen Day.
I know the allegory is a bit complicated to understand. The bottom line is that if we just leave everything to destiny and sit on our arses waiting for some miracle to happen and the sun to start shining on our lives, then we are living in a fools paradise. We know what our ultimate destination is. We more or less have the coordinates to reach it, the manual to run our planes. So why worry when we face these pockets of turbulence in our day to day lives. We should just take control of the plane and make sure we don't lose direction because the beauty of flying 30,000 feet above in the sky is the realization that while it is dark on one side, the sun is ALWAYS shining on the other side.
As someone said, dua kai saaath saath dawa bhee zaroori hai. Humans are the ashraf-al-makhlukaat (The best of creation), and what makes us even better than the angels is the fact that they praise God because it is in their nature, it is internally programmed into their essence. Humans have been bestowed this free will in which life branches out into several courses each leading to a different possible course. Do you remember reading those books, in which you made the choices and each choice would lead to a different end? I don't remember what that genre was called but it always fascinated me. Now while I write this, I realize that life is like that. Yes you are born to a certain family, into a certain religion, given a certain nurturing, yet in most of the critical phases of your life, you are given choices, these choices are very real and most importantly they are your very own. You are very much masters of your own destiny. What you chose would impact the rest of your life. Sounds scary? Kind of. Yet thats the beauty of life. In the end our guiding force, our air-traffic controller that God has built into us is our heart. I know it sounds so cliched when people say "trust your heart". However, in almost every great religion in the world, time and time again, it has been re-iterated that God resides in our heart, that God is nearer to us than our jugular veins. When the heart is inclined to a certain direction, we tend to ignore its fluttering because it seems irrational or crazy. Sadly, it has been derided over and over again by the intellectuals. If you read the biographies of really successful people, people who achieved spiritual elevation, who achieved peace of mind, who achieved soul-fullness, the common denominator is the fact that they trusted the hearts' whims almost to the extent that it seemed sacred to them. When the heart resonates, it is actually God telling us that if we follow this course then we won't get lost, we'll avoid the turbulence and we'll attain what is best for us, not only in this world but in the next.
So far in my life, all the decisions I've made while trusting my heart and following my instincts have been, on the balance of probability, the best decisions of my life. The best thing about these decisions is that you never have regrets and the heart never feels restless.
Life is already so unpredictable, yet if we wish to position ourselves for the perfect landing to the ultimate destination, we have to entrust the navigation to our hearts. As someone rightly said: "The greatest treasures are those invisible to the eye but found by the heart.”
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