Is Life Destiny?

          “The Lord lends us a body, gives us an assignment, and sends us down.  When we get the job done, the Lord calls us home again for the next assignment” (Mukherjee, 59).  Do the decisions we make set the path of how we will be living our life, or is our life really predestined before we are brought down to this planet?  Some believe that our lives are already set for us and no matter what choice we choose to make, it is inevitable that it was the course we were supposed to take.

          In my life I have been faced with many challenges.  Being a single mom to my two year old son, going to school full time, working, and taking care of my house is a lot of work and at times exhausting.  Sometimes I wonder why I was the one that was chosen to live this life.  But, I believe that God thought I was the best person for my life, and this is the reason he sent me down here.  I do believe that everything happens for a reason and there is definitely such a thing as destiny and fate.  God also never gives you more than you can handle, and he knew that I could take on all my life’s challenges no matter how large or small.

          Destiny is the predetermined course of events based on the belief that there is an irresistible power (or a fixed natural order) to the universe.  Fate is the determining cause of an inevitable course of events, why events happen as they do.  Destiny and fate are pretty much interchangeable, but they can also be distinguished.  Fate is what determines the order of events and destiny is how they work themselves out.

          In the novel Jasmine, written by Bharati Mukherjee, the main character, Jasmine, talks about how her father died a horrible death. Her father, Pitaji, believed he was able to watch death coming, and said that if God was going to take him away from this planet then he would have to be extremely sneaky about doing it.  One day Pitaji had gotten off a bus, about two hours away from his home, in the country to take a shortcut to a friend’s hut to play a game of chess.  Not ever seeing it coming, as he stepped off the bus a bull had attacked him from behind.  The death of Jasmine’s father took a big toll on her family and her life; he was never able to marry her off.

          Jasmine talks to Taylor about how everyone is sent here with one assignment.  This might be something as small as to “crunch one small piece of gravel” or “to move a flowerpot from one table to another”; no matter how big or small, we are all given a specific assignment.  She contemplates if her father completely fulfilled his life and assignment.  Was his assignment to simply just be her father and to die in this accident the way that he did, or was it to strand her in Iowa with Bud, bringing her and Du together, and being pregnant with this baby?

          Because of what has gone on in her life, at one point Jasmine wonders if she even counts as part of “God’s design”.  She talks about seeing through her third eye and if she was sent here to bring enlightenment and to sense designs in history’s “muddles”.  Jasmine wants to know what her assignment is supposed to be here on Earth and she continues to search for it throughout the novel.

          It is hard to say what everyone’s “assignment” is supposed to be when we are brought to this place.  I do believe that God knows what it is, but it is up to us to live our lives to watch and see what we are supposed to be doing here.  Jasmine does have a specific purpose on this planet just like each and every one of us.  I believe that there is a fixed natural order and destiny and fate are the major contributors to paving our predetermined lives.  “Treat every second of your existence as a possible assignment from God.  Everything you do, if you’re a physicist or a caregiver, is equally important in the eye of God” (Mukherjee, 61).