Do you believe in fate? Do you believe that everything happens for a reason to bring you to the exact point you are at right now? Regardless of whether you believe in God or not, do you feel that you only have one certain path to follow and that it's exactly what you're doing?
I do. I believe everything happens for a reason and that events lead to another. Jen and I would share stories with each other when we first started talking in November. When we started dating we began to discover many weird happenings. We spent a night looking back on our old conversations and realizing how a lot of them has happened and somehow tied back to us. For example, I'll be seeing her on March 11th. She showed a clip from a movie she was watching earlier in the day about a couple two years apart with a magic mailbox and how he was going to go visit her. I didn't see it at first, but when I paused, clicked away and clicked back, I noticed that the date the guy chose to visit her was March 11th. Another example I found was when I was looking back on my old entries. The actual first time we knew of each other was on my post dated 11/3.
So make things short, we found 16 associations with us that night. To me, it doesn't seem just as mere coincidence.
Jen also told me about the Red String of Fate, where in the folklore explained in Wikipedia:
One story featuring the red string of fate involves a young boy. Walking home one night, a young boy sees an old man standing beneath the moonlight (Yue Xia Lao). He explains to the boy that he is attached to his destined wife by a red thread. Yue Xia Lao shows the boy his destined wife, a young girl. Being young and having no interest in having a wife, the young boy picks up a rock and throws it at the girl, running away. Many years later, when the boy has grown into a young man, his parents arrange a wedding for him. On the night of his wedding, his wife waits for him in their bedroom, with the traditional veil covering her face. Raising it, the man is delighted to find that his wife is one of the great beauties of his village. However, she wears an adornment on her eyebrow. He asks her why she wears it and she responds that when she was a young girl, a boy threw a rock at her that struck her, leaving a scar on her eyebrow. She self consciously wears the adornment to cover it up. The woman is, in fact, the same young girl connected to the man by the red thread shown to him by Yue Xia Lao back in his childhood.I do also believe that people can change their own fate as well. However, I do feel that certain events will still happen no matter what. There are a bunch of theories and debates about this (especially one between one of my coworkers and friends) about the idea of fate, the idea of time, the idea of predetermined paths, etc. For me, I believe fate is real and I've experienced.
How about you? Do you believe in fate? If you believe in God, do you believe that he has created the path for you? If you aren't, do you feel that we believe it's fate only because we attach meaning to it?
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Comments (81)
I would like to believe in fate.
It makes me feel safer.
However, if fate exists, and people find who they're meant to be with, then what about the people who die alone? Are they not meant to be in love? Could 'fate' be an excuse for your love dying?
I honestly don't even know what I believe actually. I liked that story though.
Nope. I believe I am where I am because of my choices. And my future choices? They depend on my past and present choices :] I do, however, believe that fate is a word that people contribute to their personal faith
i dont know but i knew a story my mother told me.
she said her former-classmate's parens always arrange wedding marriage for her.MANY TIMES and it was the same guy she hated to bits.
at the end,they married.!ahaha
i believe in fate, somethings are placed and can't be changed...
however sometime people say fate is in the palm of our hands..
i like to believe :)
I'm agnostic, they say.
Nahhhh
I want credit for my successes and failures.
I believe in fate, because the universe likes to fuck me over as many times as it possibly can. It's either that, or I just fail at life, in which case, I might as well just kill myself.
i don't believe in fate, or anything else shown false or invaluable.
people believe in fate for the same reason they believe in god. it is meaning for the madness. believing in fate excuses them from reality (that they have done allot of harm), and keeps egos from shattering (it's okay you wern't meant to be together), and buffer's selfesteem (after all being rejected doesn't mean you are a horrible person, if fate existed). it promises them a Mr. or Ms. shining perfection, someone you find beautiful, intelligent, charming, charismatic, engaging.... et infinity.
but there is no fate just like there is no Theos. it was an interesting idea but like many others, it failed. if you treat someone uncompassionatly, you are to blame for the emotional recoil. saying "fate didn't want it" is a cheap cop out. belief in fate deludes to nothing good, but allot of harm. what if you love someone and they don't care about you? did they never care? or did pheromones and personality seem to mutate in an unbecoming manner?
http://www.xkcd.com/561/
with fate can more than one love even exist?
I kinda believe that our lives are written out the same way 'adventure books' are written. Each scenario depending on our choices may be written out and the outcome to where we are now is determined by that sequence of choices.
Right now you may be breathing in an atom of oxygen that exactly one year ago was on the exact opposite side of the planet.
But you'd never notice. And if you did you probably wouldn't care because it's not sexy.
Coincidences are extremely likely to occur all the time, and occur more frequently with people because we create more variables, like systems of times, dates, numbers and other units of measurements, traditions, names, astrological signs and blah blah blah.
And we act surprised when they coincide like it means something.
Let me ask you, what exactly do you suppose happened? The universe conspired to make you meet someone on dates in the calendar that non-existent people in a different year in a fictional universe met? Or maybe that the universe made that writer write down those dates?
Or what, god did it?
The only kind of fate that exists is causality. Shit happens for a reason, but not necessarily a good reason. Good things happen for the same reason bad things happen, the same universal force of gravitation that keeps your car on the road so you don't crash into a tree and kill yourself is going to make someone slip, crack their head on their bathroom floor and end up paralyzed for life.
Maybe the only meaning in that is the fact that one of those thing cannot happen without the other. Or more accurately, cannot be possible without the other also being possible.
Yes, I do. The bf lives in a small city 45 mins away, a city that I didn't know existed back in high school. We met at a badminton class in college. My partner ditched me that day and he happened to showed up to class to add it that day and was looking for a practice partner.
My Vietnamese co-workers have this saying:
Two people in the relationship may have met each other by fate but if they didn't owe "debt" from a previous life to each other, then they won't end up together til they die.
So, it's supposed to mean that people who die alone didn't owe any "debt" to anyone from the previous life.
yes, I strongly believe in fate and destiny. I guess that it's because when everything else seems to be crashing all around me and everything sucks, it's what makes me feel like everything will be okay.
I don't want to give credit to God, fate, or anything that
will take the fact that the relationship I have is planned.
No, the relationship, the life I have is made by my choices,
the choices that overcome situations or creates them.
I do believe the associations pop-up because of selective thinking.
There is nothing wrong with attaching meaning to things,
unless it perpetuates an idea or theme that does not pertain to the relationship
but to some superstition.
i believe in fate, becasue somethings just work out or work in the end so well that i have to laugh. I believe that you can change your path, multiple times and still end up where you were supossed to be. i also believe in serendipity :D
but if i dont see it happeneing it most likely wont happen
i don't believe in fate any more than i believe in santa clause.
Fate is what pretentious people call things that happen to them in order to make those things sounds more significant and mysterious.
http://plentymorefishoutofwater.blogspot.com/
i love that story
@lollarious@xanga - The folklore?
there must be some evil joker messing with the red strings connecting people who have separated/divorced from "the one", whom they thought they were destined to be with forever. there is this saying in chinese that says that fate led them to one another but they were not destined to be together...which is what happens to me quite often. fate likes to torture lovesick souls
I have an example of fate not of love though but I think this is fate that my grandma's neighbor from about 40 years ago in another country overseas, who she lost contact with, somehow migrated thousands of miles away to the same country, same state, same city and somehow rented the same apartment complex a few years after she moved in, so they are neighbors again after all these years by fate?
coincidence.
@Bushy_Tailed@xanga - Nicely done. Gotta love that 80's style glam rock done in the 00's.
But, besides that, the only other thing I really do know is that the person I'm with right now, is the best thing that ever happened to me.
No.
Because I'm not a little kid who believes in fairy tales.
Nothing is just going to knock on your door and come to you. You have to work to get what you want. You have to put yourself out there in a world where dog-eats-dog and make yourself noticed, make yourself stand out to get what you want.
You make your own "destiny".
People who believe in fate do so the same reason they believe in god. To use it as a scapegoat.
"Maybe I wasn't meant to do that anyway."
"It wasn't god's wish that I do this. He has other plans for me."
It's just another imaginary method people use to make themselves feel better and/or put the blame on something/someone else if it didn't turn out the way they wanted it to.