Always Aditya

What is the chance that I will clear my exam this time around? Hmmm… No Idea. It actually depends upon how good my choice of the way of presenting the paper was. Writing the paper was a chance. The way it was written was a choice. The outcome of a work done is directly proportional to the way it is performed. When I think of Superheroes one thing I always find common among them is none of them asked for the powers or such a destiny. Spider man did not ask for it. Superman did not ask for it. Harry Potter did not ask for it. But when they got to know about their powers, they made a choice, which they thought would benefit others. “It is not our abilities that show what we truly are. It is our choices.”

Chance and Choice. These two words boast of having a place at the core of philosophical books. All the sacred books talk about the chances and choices in man’s life. Spiritually, these two concepts are considered the very basis for human existence in this life and thereafter. So, in simple terms, the chance of being a human again in next life depends upon the choices we make in this life.

We see governments complaining about over-population or under-population all the time. While the Indian Government is urging its citizens to go by choice and not by chance in planning their family, the Singapore Government is encouraging its citizens to exploit the chance they have got and increase the population full throttle.

As per my friend’s observation, today is a chance and tomorrow is always a choice. But most of the time the world is so busy with their work that they never realise they are making a choice each and every minute of their life, whether good or bad. They have just got accustomed to the concept of living till they have a meeting with death. If at all they get to know about the meeting, the chance of living a year or even a month more is explored. The life that is between birth and death is merely a flow of events involving all sorts of chances and choices. In other words, a man’s life as such is totally based on the chances he gets and the choices he makes.

When Chetan Bhagat talked about the decisions of the three friends in his book Five Point Someone, I always felt bad for these guys and the situations they got themselves into. The choices we make in our life need not be bad from the start. It’s only that our inefficiency to deal with those things makes the choices look bad. It’s like a bat in the hand of a cricketer. It’s not about the bat but the batsman. Incidentally, when I look back, at the last four years of my life, I made more mistakes than correct decisions. May be having my own site and making some of the best friends of my life are the only good ones.

Being happy or not is related to our choice of whether we want to suffer the pain or have the power to endure the suffering. The reason that we could not get what we want or the impossibility of not being able to lay our hands on something we have grown to have a great liking for, results in suffering. The choice is whether we let our weakness take control and suffer, or be stoic. In other words, we always have a choice.

If words such as big and small are the yardstick to measure the importance of a chance, then good or bad are the words for choice. History, in school, for me was only a subject full of stories, which were interesting and provided for a nice post lunch lullaby. But never did I think that history is the snowballing of many choices made by people right from Galileo’s time to Mahatma Gandhi’s. Choice is, in short, making history. Chance, on the other hand, facilitates the choice to make history. A choice represents our view of the world, religion, human kind, our traditions, personality, outlook, our standing as regards finance and politics etc.

Is the Universe by chance or by choice? A chance to human kind or a choice of God to give humankind a chance? In all these chances and choices, the Principle of Uncertainty arises at each and every step of decision-making. The uncertainty can be about what is right and what is not. The uncertainty principle here does not exactly refer to Physics or particles and atoms as in Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, but has a touch of philosophy, psychology and human logic attached to it, apart from the trends of the human race at that particular moment of decision-making. Till the precise moment of drifting towards a decision, the uncertainty principle always plays its part to the hilt. It literally plays with the mind of the person and if the person is fickle then it can play havoc with his decision-making abilities. Even though it is not necessary that these choices are made at the mercy of uncertainty but the less uncertain a mind is, the better the chance of making a correct choice.

“Whatever comes our way, whatever battle we have raging inside us, we always have a choice. It’s the choices that make us who we are and we can always choose to do what’s right”.