Do we have a choice?

Pretty much a person’s life is nothing more than a string of events. You come into contact with different people every day that goes unnoticed by yourself and them. Do you make a difference in their life? Do they make a difference in your life? I am reminded of a commercial that starts with one person smiling at another as they pass by on a busy street. That smile gets past between dozens of different people throughout the day and ends back to the person who started it. I don’t even know what the commercial was advertising but it impacted me on how a simple smile given to a stranger ended up changing dozens of people’s lives by the end of the day. Is it that simple, that we have the choice to make the day turn out the way we want it to?

In my multicultural literature class we began reading a wonderful novel Jasmine by Bharati Mukherjee. It is a story of a young Hindu girl from India that after life-changing-events travels to America to start a new journey. Did she, Jasmine, have a choice to uproot her life and go to America, or was it predetermined for her by God? That is the question I am going to tackle but not absolutely rule on.

In the first sentence of the book we get the sense that for Jasmine, her life is predestined. “An astrologer cupped his ears…and foretold my widowhood and exile.” (pg 3) She is told then when she was very little and refuses to believe it is true. Right away I got the feeling that Jasmine is not going to just sit back and let things happen to her, even thought that is the custom in this culture. She, even from a small child, is determined to live her life through her choices and not be held down by a “prediction”. “No…you don’t know what my future holds” (pg 3) is the defiant response to the destiny laid out to her.

The more I read and learned about the character of Jasmine the more I believed that she is her own person. She is a strong woman that is determined to make her own choices. She does not come across though as disrespectful or ill-behaved towards her elders. All Jasmine wants is the comfort that she is shaping her own world, that she is not just a puppet on a string. “I felt totally in control.” (pg 44) Jasmine believes that her life is not predetermined by the stars; she has a choice and she wants to make it herself.

I believe we all have a choice in the way our lives will shape out to be. I don’t totally disregard destiny though. I think there is a plan for each and every one of us in life but I don’t think we are just limited to one. Like the smiles that get passed along, if we chose not to smile perhaps it would only affect us that one day. So that destiny to make others smile that day we would have chose not to fulfill it. I believe we have the free will to choose which destinies we want to fulfill in our lives.