My shot at decoding destiny

Probably the two words I have heard more than any other in my life are destiny and fate. I don’t know if the concept of destiny is localized to the Indian subcontinent and to people who are descendants of ancient civilizations. When I was in Europe, I heard no one speak about destiny. It was as if such a thing did not even exist in their world. The context in which the word is used is in itself ironic. When we succeed in achieving something, it is because of our hard work and when we don’t it gets attributed to destiny. Well, first of all, working hard will only take us from point A to point B in life because when we invest ourselves completely into something, we must have usually decided what we want and how to get there. For me, working smart is what reveals to me what is out there other than point B. So when we fail in getting or doing something, there might be many reasons for it. Maybe we did not do the appropriate things when they were supposed to be done, we were blinded by someone’s perception and so on. Then what must be destiny?
This question has vexed me for the longest time primarily because I am simply not able to accept that everything in my life has been decided in advance. It makes me feel like I am a preprogrammed robot. Then how do we explain emotions and unique experiences we go through? When the entire cosmos can be defined and explained using numbers and probability, why are they not applicable to our lives as well? What if we are presented with choices continuously in our lives and what we choose defines our life ahead as well as the lives of other people? Let me substantiate this with an example from my life. When my grandfather retired from his job in India, he was given an offer to work from London for 2 years. It was the early 1970s and it was a very easy time to relocate. He chose not to. Fast forward to 2010 and there was an opportunity for me to get a transfer to my company’s office in the UK but I couldn’t go because company was not ready to apply for my work visa. My point here is, life could have been so different for the entire family if he had chosen to go. He went back to where he was born and had struggled for a long time, struggled again in his old age and passed away with a lot of regret. I have never seen anything preordained here. It was the choices he made that defined his life and is probably defining my life now.
But then there is a mystery here. The unique personalities we all have. This is where it gets tricky. Our soul is pure energy which powers our entire body. At the moment we are conceived in our mother’s womb, we cannot be defined in any way which can be equated with our interpretation of God. As we grow in our mother’s womb, we start becoming aware of the world outside the womb through her feelings and emotions. Our personality development starts from that point. We lose the purity of our souls when we are enveloped with all the social constraints of the world. Here is where the conflict is. Our bodies are supposed to be reflections of our pure souls but they end up becoming representations of our personalities that are defined by our evolution through our experiences. So death is detaching our personality from our soul and reverting the soul to it’s pure form again. So when we speak about reincarnation, it should be the rebirth of our personality.
No matter if we are aware of this or not, we are all learning from our experiences and everything that we learn is what is causing our personalities to evolve. Is destiny something that defines what a personality has to experience to move from point A to point B in it’s journey? Maybe the soul is the engine that powers the personality’s journey and our body is just a mode of transportation for the personality. Probably this is why we get connected to some people so well and sometimes so quickly. Our personalities must be crossing paths in our travel through time.
So where does all of this leave us with destiny? Blissfully resting the accountability of our actions and choices on something that we cannot even define has probably made our species so dangerous. Aren’t we using destiny as the fall guy for all our wrongdoings? Aren’t we using destiny as a license to not make the right choices? A woman gets raped because she was destined for it? Someone gets killed by a suicide bomber or in road rage because it was his destiny? Unbelievable. Does whatever we experience and go through as a result of the wrong decisions we take add value to us? Is there a higher power that is judging us on our actions and choices? Again, hard for me accept. This looks more to me like extremely complicated and intricate mathematics at play. Then did someone create all of it? Maybe yes, but did that entity define our destiny? Definitely no. It just has to be one of the outcomes of what we call as creation.