Why do I exist? What is my mission in life? These are questions that have crossed my mind more and more about now that I am close to the end of my undergraduate study. Being that this is my last semester, what will be the next step in my life? Will I be working an 8am-5pm job? Will I return to school? Does God have an assignment waiting for me to fulfill or is it up to me to choose my own destiny in life to live out? Some people believe in predestination and fate, and others believe in having full control of their destiny. I am a big believer of the latter. Where I go in life is up to me. I am free to set my own missions. However, there are many people out there who believe in fate and predestination as oppose to free will. The question I am curious about is if it’s possible to believe in both predestination and free will.
Bharati Mukherjee’s character in the novel, “Jasmine”, provides us with a good study of this topic of fate, predestination, and free will. Jasmine has shown that she is determined to take control of her own destiny. Her desire for education particularly learning English shows that she’s determine to better herself and escape her disenfranchised subaltern status. (Burton 87) Her desire to “re-position the stars”(215) clearly demonstrates her will to be in control of her destiny. While she believes she can control her destiny, she also talked a lot about certain things that we as humans cannot control or there are certain things that God put us on this Earth to do. We don’t know what these assignments or missions are until we complete them, then “the Lord calls us home again for the next assignment” (59). Because we do not know exactly what God has in store for us, the incentive is to treat every second of your life as a possible assignment from God. So for Jasmine, when she came to America, she felt that her mission was to bring her husband’s suit here and burn it where they were going to live. However, she soon discovered that her mission was not yet over after she murdered Half-Face, the white man who smuggled and raped her. God still has other assignments for her in America.
So these missions and assignments that Jasmine spoke of to Taylor, it seems like everyone has them. Some might be small, and some might be significant. One’s life mission might be just to “move a flowerpot from one table to another; all the years of education and suffering and laughter, marriage, parenthood, and education, serving merely to put a particular person in a particular room with a certain flower.” (60) Once that mission is completed, God will take you home for your next assignment. Taylor, coming from a western and modern perspective, finds it hard to understand and believe this whole thing about missions and assignments. “I couldn’t live in a world like yours.” (61) Perhaps, Taylor does believe in fate and predestination but only in free will.
Jasmine has shown so far in the novel that one can possess both the ideas of predestination and free will as she is determined to control her own destiny while still holding on to the idea of God’s missions and assignments. Unlike her, I only believe in the free will side of it. The choices that I make for the reminder of the semester will determine if I come back to graduate school or enter to work force immediately after graduation. Making choices for the future are tough, but I believe it is still better than not having any choices at all.
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Nice work Pan! I think that we agree on this topic!! I wish I would have read this earlier! I like to know that someone else out there feels the same! I know the feelings of uncertainty! It is nice to know that God does have a plan, though! :)