Article by Kardi Teknomo
 

What have you learned from your life? Life is about learning to change. Learning about life itself and learning to live. Life is a sequence of decisions and possibilities. It is true that there are things in life that you cannot change it. We cannot change the past and we cannot change what have been done. However, there are more things in life that you believe they could not be changed, which actually they are changeable. We can change our future.

Anything that happens in your life is because of your own decision, or perhaps the decision of your parents or ancestor or other person. When your parents or ancestor decided to move in the place you now live, they have decided out many possibilities. You can accept their decision by living in the same place, or you can move to another place. Any decision brings some consequences.

You may not be able to change things that happened in the past, or things that are out of your control, but you can learn from them. What happen in the past or out of your control may be considered as destiny. Problems always happen and you can expect them, as the sun rises from the East and sets in the West, but you are ready to face them. Good preparation will most probably bring success. Some catastrophes such as war, sickness, disaster, flood, earthquake, storm, accident, tsunami, collapse of economy, etc. happens all the time. In most cases, we cannot control them, but we can prepare something to face them. We can create an early warning system; we can build wave breakers, deviation channel for lava or flood, save our money for the worst case, etc. To learn something from our life, we need to overcome destiny.

In most cases, you are the one who creates your own troubles and successes. You are the one who creates your own destiny. You have the free will. You can do whatever you can to avoid bad things happening again. Of course, no decision is without risk. Your brave act to decide is the key to your own success. You can bravely decide without any doubt because you have the maturity in planning and consideration. You can plan with maturity because you know what your life purpose is, what you want to carry through your life.

Do not let your destiny haunt you as long as your life. The world with a haunted destiny is static and has no choice. It prevents you to learn from your life. As if God controls your fate to be just like this. You have no choice but to accept them all. If you are poor, then as if you are destined to be poor forever. If you are ugly then it is what you are. If you are stupid or one of the unlucky, then you will always be like that. Every time you face a difficult situation or bad situation, you will see it as God's will and you have no choice but to accept it. If thieves enter your house, you will do nothing because you accept it as destiny. If there is an accident, some government will do nothing to prevent it to happen because they believe it is just their fate to have those accidents. For those of you, who think that this kind of belief does not exist, don’t laugh at my sentences above. In fact, these beliefs still exist in many poor societies today.

Peter just suffered a car accident and his beloved one died. He trusts the accident was just a destiny. His belief brings comfort for a while because he can accept it as unavoidable. Since it was inescapable, there was nothing he could do and the best way was just to accept the accident as it was. What a great relief! Suppose he does not believe that the accident is just his fate, the grief of that accident may consume him emotionally.

Those who believe that catastrophes cannot be prevented argue that though you can do something to prevent that accident happen, whatever you do, it will be just a useless and waste of time because bad things will happen anyway. What pessimistic and negative point of view they have. On the other hand, if you are willing learn from your life, this may be the way of your thinking: While it is true you can do nothing when bad things happen, it is not true that it is a fate that is unavoidable. You can always do something to prevent bad things to happen. You can always prepare for the bad situation. Did you see my point now?

Those who think the world is static and pessimistic will always feel that any effort is useless and it is better if nothing is done. It is a desperate point of view. Conversely, if you learn to change something from your life, you may believe that you have freedom to think, to construct, to improve, and to prevent bad things to happen again. As the result in the long run, the community who believe in destiny will have no development while the societies who believe in a free will have much more progress. You can only see the result in the long run, in the short time, however, believing in destiny offer comfort to heal the pain.

 Having free will means you determine your own fate. If something goes wrong, it is your own fault. If something goes better, it is your success. You do not blame any other person or situation or God or even Satan for your own failure and mistake. Failure is not always related to mistake or sin. Random chance happens.

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