There is something strangely compelling about the word “fate.”

Is everything already determined from the beginning?

Or are the events that unfold in our lives simply the result of chance?

I have always felt that there is something incomplete about treating these two ideas as entirely separate.

In philosophy, the relationship between free will and determinism has been debated for centuries.

Do human beings truly possess the ability to choose for themselves?

And if the future is determined, in some way, by an intricate chain of causes and effects, can our choices still be considered free?

At the same time, “chance” is not as simple as it may seem.

Even within events we describe as accidental, there may be countless layers of causation: our environment, our experiences, our relationships with others, and the decisions we have made along the way.

That is why I do not think of fate as a future that has been decided in advance.

Rather, perhaps fate is the process through which one path becomes reality, chosen from among countless possibilities through our own decisions.

Do we turn right?

Or do we turn left?

In that moment, it is we who make the choice.

And yet, the person who chooses to turn right has also been shaped by everything that came before—the experiences we have lived through, the people we have met, the things we have lost, and the thoughts we have carried with us.

Seen this way, perhaps saying,

“I chose this myself,”

and saying,

“Maybe this was my fate all along,”

are not necessarily contradictory.

There are encounters that seem like coincidences.

There are events that happen that we could never have anticipated.

And then there is the choice we make about how we respond to them.

Perhaps fate does not exist in the future itself.

Perhaps it exists somewhere between possibility and choice.

Maybe the future is not a single fixed path.

Maybe countless possibilities exist, and we gradually bring one of them into reality through the choices we make.

And only after repeating those choices, looking back on the path we have taken, can we finally say:

“This was my fate.”

That is why I believe fate is not something that is simply given to us.

It is something we carve out for ourselves.

And yet, there is something almost paradoxical about that idea.

The very path we believe we carved out for ourselves may, perhaps, have been part of something we were always destined to call “fate.”

Fate and chance.

Free will and determinism.

Perhaps neither side is entirely right or entirely wrong.

Perhaps it is precisely in the space between them that we find something fundamental about what it means to be human.

心晴れるまで

土屋梨沙