Free Will?

As the days go by and we grow older, it seems that we start to notice things that we didn't seem to have noticed before. Things as mundane as how the grass grows, how the sun shines, and how the children around have fun. Then, from these mundane things that we see with our very eyes, we slowly start to think about things that have happened in our lives, and wonder if there was anything that we could have done better...

But then again, suppose that we had indeed done "better" then; will we be able to arrive at the same conclusion that we have arrived at earlier, that we could have done better? I suppose so, since there is no real "ideal" life where everything is so perfect that there is nothing more that we can ask for, barring any of those metaphysical concepts about the after-life and the other related concepts of a utopian situation where one transcends life etc. Our lives as individuals are marked by the things that we do, and it is often that in the things that we need to do, there is no such thing as the final "correct" answer; there are many different paths with which we can actually take in order to solve any of the problems that come our way.

Introspectively, could I have done better? Perhaps, but I know that all these thoughts on hindsight are just that; thoughts on hindsight. I've more or less lived out this life in a way that leads on to me being the way I am now, and nothing is going to change what I had done in the past. But what I can do is to deal with the things that I do in the present, so as to be able to dictate to a large degree what I will become in the future. People often use the excuse of "leaving it to fate" as a means of justifying the lack of active usage of free will; I think that this is foolhardy. Fate is but a guide to certain near-known results; we cannot really tell what our fate really is, even with the combined powers of all the geomancers/palmists/seers in the world. Why fate is powerful yet not omnipotent lies in the fact that we do possess a tool on our side, our own decision making process, something that we call "free will". Free will is to fate as yin is to yang; they counter and balance each other out.

Some people might argue that the decisions we make are still under the influence of our fate, and I do not claim to dismiss that. What I am claiming is, if we can make a decision that can potentially solve a problem that we have at hand, we should make that decision and not worry at all if there's involvement of fate or not. Put simply, some mistakes we make are necessary, because our decision-making process led us there; it might have been preventable, but the aftermath shows that it was in a way inevitable to a small extent.

The thing is, to live without regrets of any sort.

I'll stop here on the rambling and will probably post up something more interesting a little later.