Human Volition

It's so cruel, and it's so limited.
I think about it a lot.

It's no wonder why so many people are religious, believing that there truly is such thing as fate, or as they prefer to call it, something like a "divine will". Everyone wants to believe that "everything will be okay in the end, and if it's not okay, it's not the end." Sounds wonderful.

The great thing about having faith in a divine entity is that there is always someone to trust when you don't know who else to trust. There is always someone you can throw all your troubles to when you no longer know what to do with them or how to handle them. Having faith is almost like having eternal optimism.

With me being one of the largest skeptics to exist on the face of the earth, the idea of "fate" or a "divine plan" is not an exception to my skepticism.

But today is one of those days when I feel like fate must exist.
I've always been one to believe that there is no such thing as blind luck or a scripted plan of your life, and that the only thing your life is built upon is what you do with it- the choices you make, the action you choose to take.

But today, I'm not so sure.

Today, I feel the meaning of that belief. I feel the stinging loneliness, the darkness of the despair entwined in those words, that kind of hopelessness that drops like a stone in your stomach. Today I feel that if I was alone to fend for myself, to suffer disappointment by myself, to sculpt every aspect of my life by myself, to leave what I can't get to to the random entropy of the universe,
it would be too much.
It would be too much for any human being who had any semblance of a heart and a mind.


I hate not being in control, and that characteristic about me has been something that has molded me as a person for the last four years, especially. I hate not having my life tethered to strings; I hate not holding the reins. I've always hated the idea of luck because it's something I can't control. I'm not a drinker and I don't do drugs, mainly because those things would compromise the control I have over myself, and that's the last thing I would ever want to do.

But more and more often these past few years, I've been shoved in situations that I no longer find I have any control over, and I don't know how to deal with them anymore. More and more often, I've found myself no longer knowing what to trust or who to trust with the parts of my life that I can't control.

I always viewed fate as a cop-out excuse, the thing people blame or accredit their circumstances to so they don't have to take responsibility for how their own lives are. I've always been told, "If you work hard enough, you will succeed." Or "you can do anything if you try hard enough." It's not true, because there are always positive things in undeserving people's lives, and there are plenty of people who carry burdens that they don't deserve. Perhaps my rigid confidence in pure human volition was just my way of denying what I didn't want to believe, my way of trying to convince myself that the world is more fair than it actually is.

If only I could find it within me to surrender myself to the idea of fate right now, to release my life into unknown hands, to bring myself to believe that things will work out just fine. But I'm not conditioned to believe that anymore. I've conditioned myself to fight, and now I'm just not strong enough to drop my sword.


Is there really such a wonderful thing as fate?
If only, if only.