The Future Predecided

I am curious to know what my fellow writers think about their future. Other than death which we all know is predecided, do you believe the events leading up to that are predecided for you or are you creating your own future?

For me, it's hard to tell. I'd like to think I am creating my own future, but am I.

Charlie

Hmmm

I read a post the other day from a 21 year old slacker hoping his autobiography will get published. At one point he says, "If they won't publish my life story, I might kill myself."

Take awhile to sort out the irony and alternatives of THAT one.

Charlie,
I think much depends on the age of a person. Being young, one can create a future with goals and ambition. Once one has reached retirement age, the future becomes shorter. Keeping occupied with small goals, like writing, working in the garden, taking a trip or a hike, etc., is living the future. To many of us, the future is now.
Old clocks one could wind up and keep them ticking. Now the clicks have cell batteries and they eventually die.

I don't get the part about death being predecided. I don't agree with that idea.

I think there are so many factor that lead someone down any one path in life. One would be of good social standing if you are born into money; you can have an easier start in life than some one born with little or no money. This doesn't mean it will stay that way. For as you grow into adulthood you can find things shift for good or bad. How many born into money lost their fortune through recent events as well as in the past, 1928 crash. At the same time many have through seeing a chance made it to the wealth that others have lost. It is as much down to the choices we make that define where we will end up in life yet at the same time it is also the events that are thrust our way.

I do not believe in predestination. I believe we make choices and have to live with them or modify them.

Dick Stodghill wrote:

I don't get the part about death being predecided. I don't agree with that idea.

My husband tells his students every year that they cannot extend their lifespan; they can only shorten it. Churchill smoked cigars all his life, had a heart attack in his sixties and lived into his nineties. Someone else doing the same might have died from the heart attack. Death comes to everyone and we cannot choose the time and place.

I have a friend who says God gives you a certain amount of things to accomplish in your lifetime. If that is true, I am so far behind that I will probably live forever.

There are so many different ways to look at it. I am not sure I believe one way or the other. What is, simply is, and what will be will be. I guess I will find out for sure when I get there.

I think what he means is, it's the one sure thing about life--it will end.

I believe that date of leaving this life is on God's calendar and we have no idea when it is. Of course, some people would say God doesn't have a calendar.

Three times in the past year I was close to that leaving. One time when my blood pressure was very low, I really felt I was on my way to someplace else than this world. But I am still here, and haven't come to that date yet, and I have no idea when that will be. In the meantime I'm looking at each day as a gift and living life to the fullest with both gratitude and hope.

Carol

I think we come to this place for a reason, with lots of possibilities. So do all of us, and we are all interconnected. If one of us falls, the others are affected, so we have a responsibility give a hand to those who need one, because if they don't fulfill their mission, we just might not either.

Ann

I've watched too many men die to believe any of it is determined ahead of time by someone toying with lives. If that is true, why do anything at all? Hasn't everything been settled ahead of time?
When the lieutenant in my company shot himself in the foot to keep from going into battle, was that the work of someone protecting him from what lay ahead? Is every bullet on every battlefield guided this way and that in order to pick off certain people? Is every bomb steered on its way so that it mutilates a kid of 4 and kills his parents?
I don't believe any of it. Doing so would be nonsensical and self-serving.

The little cemetery in Mulege, Mexico...an oasis in the Baja desert... has a very un-Mexican slogan carved on the entry arch:

"Here is where your ideas and schemes all run into reality."

When I said death was predecided I meant it quite generically. Simply that we're all going to die. The event is predecided. Whether it be by a bullet on the battlefield or by suicide or by natural causes incident to age or for any other reason we will die. Whether you agree with it or not, it is foreordained.

My thought with this thread was to get comments about the future of our lives. The comments so far have been great. I believe we are perhaps born at a particular time set aside for us. I also believe that while some things in our future are predecided, it is up to us, as Abe has said, and others, to shape what our living future ultimately will be.

Charlie

Charlie Moore wrote:

I am curious to know what my fellow writers think about their future. Other than death which we all know is predecided, do you believe the events leading up to that are predecided for you or are you creating your own future?

For me, it's hard to tell. I'd like to think I am creating my own future, but am I.

Charlie

This is a very difficult question. I think I can try to bring about my death a bit sooner--call the cops and try punching them out, swim in shark infested waters, try clmbing Mt Everest, etc.

Even hanging around some doctors and trying too many pills can be risky.

Basically I believe that God has a plan- you will be here as long as He wants you here.

While you are here, you decide what you want to do. I know a woman who says God planned for her to marry a man to care for his children.
He then left her for a much younger woman. I don't think God had anything to do wth it.

I know other people who move because God is leading them. I think
they want to move. I don't think God cares where you live.

This messageboard is getting into some deep philosophical thoughts.

I believe we have free will, but also there are things happening in our lives we have no control over, and also that God has things He'd like us to do while here, but we can decide if we want to do them or not.

We need to try to be healthy, but finally just going with the flow of life is an option.

Carol

How can anyone who believes in a loving God, that this God would would send people to a premature death in war, in a car accident, by an assassins bullet, or anything else. The only predestination, as Charlie pointed out, is that one day we will die. What we do from birth until death is controlled by our actions and the actions of others. Praying for God's protection is what faith is all about. Taking care of yourself, watching what you eat, looking before crossing the street will help, but won't protect you from a bomb dropped on you. Was that the fault of God? I hardly think so.

Well, some would say that to God there is no such thing as a "premature death".

And that a being who designed us to die, who spun out a universe of continual destruction, is not fazed by deaths. All part of the plan, the thinking would go. The mysterious ways.

If we are all going to die, and if to God time is irrelevant, perhaps whether we are 9 or 90, it doesn't matter. Perhaps it is not the days of our lives, but what we do with the days we are given.

Just thinking here.

Carol

My little brother lived a bit under eight years. He was one of the wisest people I've known. He lived a full life. He even had a girlfriend, Peggy. She was a year older than he, but he would say, "I don't worry about that. Her friend said she 'ist adores me." They would double date with his older brother and his girl, who happened to be Peggy's older sister. One night I heard Bill and Bob in their bedroom, Bob saying, "She won't let me go, Bill, you know she won't," and Bill replying, "Just leave it to me. Don't say anything; I'll handle it." A bit later the two of them strolled through the kitchen toward the door. Jeans and sports jackets, the only difference was their height, and the fact that Bob kept looking back over his shoulder at Mom, expecting her to call him back. "We're taking Betty and Peggy to the basketball game. We'll be back around ten." My mouth was hanging open. She let him go!! They came back, on time; Bill was no fool. "Did you behave properly and mind your brother," Mom asked him. "Yep," he said back, "I stayed with him all the time, except when I had to go get Peggy a Tootsie-Pop." He was so cool.

A few days later Bill learned about his "Lady Friends." It was raining, so Bill drove him to school. Mother didn't drive, so usually he walked. Alone. He and I walked the first two blocks together, then we had to turn in opposite directions. Every few steps away, he would turn and say, "By, Ann." And after a few more, "I'll see ya!" when I finally had to turn north, I could barely hear him in the distance, "I'll see ya!"

Anyway, shortly before reaching the elementary school that rainy morning, Bob insisted that Bill stop the car while he rolled down the window and waved to two little white haired ladies sitting at their front window. They clearly recognized him and waved back, so Bob let Bill drive on. "Myrtle and Beattie are my lady friends," he explained. "They woulda worried about me if I hadn't stopped. I talk to them every day when I walk by. They're old and their families live far away, so we visit each other."

One day Bob came into see me, terribly frightened. He took me to Mom and Dad's room and showed me where he had accidentally spilled tomato juice on Mom's brand new pale yellow bedspread. Not wanting him to get in trouble, I suggested we turn the spread around so that the stain wouldn't show. She would find it eventually, but it would buy us time to figure something out, I told him. He shook his head. "No. She's gonna be really mad, but turning the bedspread would be like lying, and we can't lie, Ann." He was like that.

Just before the next Easter, Bob brought in his piggybank and asked Dad to open it. "I'm gonna give Myrtle and Beattie some pink carnations." Mother suggested maybe a plant would be more practical, but he replied, "No, Mom. Myrtle and Beattie are really old, so old they could die. They can't take care of a plant; it has to be pink carnations." On Easter Sunday, he, Bill, Peggy and Betty went out to dinner together, after they dropped the carnations off at Myrtle and Beattie's house. Bob wore a pair of charcoal slacks, a light grey sport coat, and kept one of those pink carnations for his lapel. No wonder Peggy adored him.

He died that same year, in late August. We covered his casket with pink carnations.

I don't know why we have wars, or why children die, but I know that the Universal Force, by whatever name one might call it, for some reason I don't understand, allowed my family to spend seven and a half years with a very special angel.

Ann

That's beautiful story Ann. Isn't it amazing the details we remember from those special moments in our lives, the clothes people wore, the things people said.

Carol

Ann,

What a story. No wonder your mother was a bit strained.
Such a terrible loss to have to deal with.

Charlie,
this thread of yours has raised lots of questions. Predestination, self-preservation, luck or what?
There are several on this board that told about death defying illnesses, like Carol with cancer. Heart attack with Don. Alice with her continued struggles and others. Then there are people like Dick who were in the heat of battle and survived. Was it fate? It made me wonder why I am still here.
At age 16 I was run over by a motorboat and the propellers missed my spine by 1 centimeter. I fell asleep while driving on the turnpike and woke up just before going off a bridge. I was driving at high speed on the German Autobahn at night and a truck sat disabled in my lane without lights. I turned the wheel, closing my eyes thinking I would hit, but missed with only a scratch on the paint of the car. A firefight was in progress when I stepped into the street in front of the Holiday Inn in Beirut, a tank facing me and the firing stopped. I came to my senses, ran to safety, and then the firing resumed.
Why am I still alive? Is there an explanation? Is it fate, predestination, luck or what?

Abe,

Sometimes the question isn't "why me?" but "why not me?"

I do believe there are angels that wake us up in time, or keep the tanks from shooting, or somehow get us the right medical treatment. For some things there are genes that might give us the illness, and there are others that help us get well.

It is a mystery. Sometimes I think it is predestined and other times merely chance.

Carol

One night, when Bob was a baby, my mother had a terrible nightmare. She dreamed that someone was trying to break into our house. She saw this man coming toward the front door, and barely managed to get it locked in time. The man turned and started toward the back entry. She ran through the house, and again, barely made it in time. This time the man walked to the side of the house. This house was an old southern cottage type. In the middle of the "living areas" was the dining room, opening on to the kitchen at one end, ant the living room at the other. There were large double doors between the dining and living room. The outside wall of the dining room was solid windows, only in Mom's dream, the windows weren't there, only a wide open, unprotecting space, and the stranger started walking through it, toward her. She woke up, bolting upright in the bed. Frightened, she woke my dad, who assured her it was only a bad dream, and they both went back to sleep, but then, heard a loud rattling sound coming from the dining room windows. This time they both jumped out of bed, wide awake, and could see smoke coming into their bedroom from the living room. Dad looked into the living room and saw that the floor furnace in the corner of the living room, next to the dining room doors, had flames shooting up from it. He grabbed Bob from his crib, and Mom ran to get Bill and I from our bedrooms. Dad took all of us to a neighbor's house, had the housewife call the fire department, while he and our neighbor ran back to our house to start fighting the fire until the firetruck arrived. They had it under control by the time the firemen got there, and were told that they probably saved the house. In another matter of seconds, the firemen told them, the whole side of the house would have been ablaze. As it was, the only damage was to the hardwood floor around the furnace. Once things had calmed down, Dad started to wonder about the clattering noise, and noticed that the dining rooms window drapes had fallen, and lay in a heap on the floor, a foot or so from the blackened hole where the furnace had been. It had fallen, and rattled the window blinds as it fell, fallen from the same window that was missing in Mom's dream, allowing the intruder to enter. The next morning, Dad started to rehang the drape. He expected to find its hook on the floor, but when he did not, assumed it had been kicked through the hole while he and the neighbor were fighting the fire. He went to his tool room and got another hook. As he climbed the ladder with the new hook, he was surprised to find the original still in the wall, perfectly and tightly in place. For the drape to have fallen, it had to somehow come up, over, and around that hook.

As a family, over the next few weeks, we worked at coming up with rational reasons for the night's events. We came up with several possibilities, but none that explained everything happening in the precise time sequence, or at the precise place, to save, not just our house, but all of us as well.

I still often find myself asking Abe's question:

Quote :

Why am I still alive? Is there an explanation? Is it fate, predestination, luck or what?

Ann