Fate Cookies

I love fortune cookies. They're fun. I love stupid machines that claim to read your palm for 25cents. I even love stupid con-artists who claim to read your palm for $25. I recently put $1 into a Zoltar machine in San Fransisco (only half expecting to be turned into an adult - thanks to all the Tom Hanks/ 80s movies fans who got that reference)...

And yet.

I constantly struggle with the notion of fate. It's a tough pill to swallow to be sure. And I've never felt entirely comfortable with it, but I'm slightly more uncomfortable with the notion that it doesn't exist, and that the universe is a chaotic web of chance.

And yet.

I can't accept that everything is entirely planned. I can't accept this partly because my ego needs to believe that it is making important choices and that it is in the driver's seat.

And yet.

I have had the fortune of meeting a very talented medium. She's pretty much the closest thing to evidence I've ever encountered when it comes to proof of the afterlife. And it always freaks me out when she nails the details of future events, only to be validated years later.

But how, I ask, could she so accurately predict future events if things aren't predestined? What are they seeing if it's not just a page in the all-knowing bible of things to come?

The fancy-pants scientist in me wants to talk about how once two subatomic particles touch, they will forever remain connected, no matter the distance. It's called nonlocality. My inner geek wants to concoct some kind of science fiction about how our future exists in another dimension, and is only a potentiality - the product of my subatomic particles affecting those future particles ... Or something. I can almost picture it as an ever-changing mass of probabilities that at any moment can be seen - that is to say that a psychic can tap into this - take a snapshot of the landscape and describe it back to us. But in a way, it's only true at that very moment. In that very moment, it is our current trajectory - a very probable outcome.

Or maybe I defer to my belief that we plan our lives before we're born... And although we're driving the course on auto-pilot, we were the ones who built the road.

I don't know. But the truth of the matter is, half of me loves the comfort of the thought that it's all already in the works, and that the universe is working it's mysterious magic to bring me everything I need to accomplish what I set out for.

The other half of me is wondering who on earth would throw out all these fortune cookies!