Destiny

I’ve been thinking a lot about destiny lately. How much power do we have over our lives? Are they predetermined, or can we change things?

For example, there’s that latest AT&T commercial. You know, the one where the ballerina drops her phone while it’s downloading something from the web, and she bends down to pick it up just as someone who has the power to influence her career passes—which is when the screen goes split and we see how her life is different because her phone downloaded sooner with AT&T so, in turn, she has the opportunity to audition, landing the staring ballerina role of the dance rather than being the waitress who serves the group of dancers at the table.

Or that movie, The Peculiar Case of Benjamin Button, where, again, it's a ballerina, only she gets hit by a taxi all because some woman she doesn't even know turns back to get her umbrella (or maybe it’s a package), which is when the woman answers her phone, which causes her to get into that same taxi five minutes later than she would have, which causes the taxi to hit the ballerina, who would not have been anywhere near the street when the taxi should have passed her building.

How many of these things are predetermined? It makes me wonder.