PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION

Is Life Really Like a Box of Chocolates, or is it a “Choose Your Own Adventure” Story?

Reflections on predeterminism, free will, and karma

There are moments in life that seem inconsequential at the time; choices we make, chances we take, those junctures where we reach a fork in the road and are faced with a decision about which path to take and which one to disregard. Though they may not seem like much at the time, each decision made propels us forward into future storylines in the narrative of our life.

Often, it is not until you reach an exciting plot twist, or an edge-of-your-seat cliffhanger moment, that you can look back on all the choices you made in the past that brought you to that climactic crescendo. How you feel about those historic decisions largely depends upon how you view the emerging plot point in your life story; has your story become a tragedy or a comedy? Is it turning into a feel-good romance by Richard Curtis, or has it become a dark psychological drama worthy of Darren Aronofsky?

Forrest Gump (or, more accurately, his mother) famously said that “life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get.” I like to think of it as more of a “Choose Your Own Adventure” tale, wherein your story (and, indeed, the twists and turns along the way) are decided not by a series of random chances, but through the seemingly small choices you make every single day.

Destiny’s Child? The Arguments for Fate and Predestination

My mother had a saying about fate and destiny, passed on to her from her paternal grandmother: “What’s for you willnae (will not) go past you.” The premise behind this pearl of wisdom is very similar to that expressed in the Oscar-winning Doris Day song from “The Man Who Knew Too Much”, “Que Sera Sera (Whatever Will Be Will Be)”:

“When I was just a little girl I asked my mother, what will I be Will I be pretty Will I be rich Here’s what she said to me

Que sera, sera Whatever will be, will be The future’s not ours to see Que sera, sera What will be, will be”

Songwriters: Jay Livingston / Ray Evans

In other words, if something is destined to happen to you, whether good or bad, it will happen, and you can’t run from it. If it doesn’t happen, then it’s either not the right thing for you, or it isn’t time yet. Either way, forces beyond your control have already plotted your storyline, and events will play out as preordained.

William Shakespeare wrote:

All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts….

As You Like It, Act II, Scene VII.

You may be the protagonist of the story, the actor on the stage, but the scriptwriter, director, and/or stage manager of the production are hidden in the wings, pulling invisible strings. In this way, the “life is a box of chocolates”/ “what’s for you willnae go past you” / “que sera sera” arguments are similar to the philosophies of determinism, predeterminism, and predestination.

In Christian theology, the notion of predestination is a central tenet of Protestantism, particularly Calvinism. Based on the teachings of French theologian and reformer, John Calvin (1509–1564), Calvinist doctrine argues that God has preordained the eternal destiny of every individual to either salvation by grace for the righteous or eternal damnation for sinners, and that there is nothing the individual can do to change their divinely decreed fate.

The Calvinist view of predestination often distinguishes between the preordained salvation/damnation of the soul alone and the less discriminating belief that God long ago decided everything that has or will ever happen. However, according to The Westminster Confession of Faith — a central text of Presbyterianism — God has indeed “freely and unchangeably ordained whatsoever comes to pass” (The Westminster Confession of Faith, III.1, 1646, emphasis mine).

There is some sense of comfort in the idea that one’s destiny has already been set and that they can just “go with the flow” and let events play out, apportioning neither self-satisfaction nor self-accusation upon any outcome. However, such a notion also extinguishes any sense of agency in one’s own life, leaving the individual resigned to their fate and powerless to forge their own path forward.

Any Road: Forging a Path Via Choice and Free Will

In opposition to the Protestant belief in predestination is the Catholic doctrine of Justification by Works, whereby the individual gains God’s grace (and thus achieves salvation) through fides caritate formata — “faith formed by charity”. According to the Catholic interpretation of Justification, an individual wins the grace and favor of God through their actions as well as their faith; God hasn’t yet decided who will be saved and who will be damned, and one must prove their righteousness and worthiness for Heaven by performing good works and eschewing sinful thoughts and deeds. It is the individual’s free will to choose either the path of righteousness or the path of sin.

Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken” speaks of a literal “fork in the road”, where the protagonist is faced with a choice between two paths and must decide which one they will take:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,….

And both that morning equally lay In leaves no step had trodden black. Oh, I kept the first for another day! Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I — I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.

Robert Frost, “The Road Not Taken”, 1915.

Each path lies “equally” before the traveller, one being “just as fair” as the other. The two are interchangeable, and the traveller has no idea where either road leads. Faced with the free will to choose which path to take, the traveller opts for the second simply on the basis that “it was grassy and wanted wear”. Though he wishes he had the option to return another day and try the first path, he realises that this will not be possible — once he steps onto path number two, he sets forth on a particular trajectory. Nonetheless, he muses, one day hence he will tell the story of the path he chose and will say that his decision “made all the difference” to his life.

Frost does not specify whether the “difference” is positive or negative but, according to David Orr, such a distinction is moot because the traveller’s statement “is the kind of claim we make when we want to comfort or blame ourselves by assuming that our current position is the product of our own choices (as opposed to what was chosen for us or allotted to us by chance)”. Thus, says Orr, Frost’s poem reflects on “the self-deception we practice when constructing the story of our own lives.” If we believe ourselves to be the commanders of our own destinies then the buck, ostensibly, stops with us. With this responsibility comes an onus on self-analysis, and a tendency to be over-congratulatory or overly critical of our choices, decisions, and actions.

Karma Chameleon: The Gamebook as Metaphor

I like to think of life as a Choose Your Own Adventure story. These gamebooks, first published in 1976 but gaining peak popularity during the 1980s and 1990s, give the reader two or three options after every few pages of reading, with each option propelling the narrative forward in a particular direction and, ultimately, toward one of several potential endings.

Choose Your Own Adventure books allow the reader to not only create a distinct path and a unique ending for the protagonist of their gamebook but to return to the book’s first page and start all over again, this time making different choices than those they made on previous reads. In this fashion, with repeat readings, the reader makes their way toward anywhere between 7–44 different endings.

In this way, perhaps, Choose Your Own Adventure stories can be viewed as a metaphor for the cycle of samsara; the cyclic process of birth, death, and rebirth that is central to Hindu and Buddhist theologies. Upon opening the gamebook, the reader embarks on a journey through a narrative, the ending of which is dependent upon the choices they make and actions they take (i.e. their karma). Once the climax of the story has been reached (death), they return to page one and begin again (rebirth), this time making alternate decisions along the way that will, in turn, lead to different outcomes.

In this metaphorical interpretation therefore, the ultimate goal — to reach all potential endings and traverse every path available within the story before closing the book for good and placing it back on the bookshelf — is akin to attaining moksha, mukti, kaivalya, or nirvana; namely, liberation from the wheel of samsara.

So, who wrote the overall text of the Choose Your Own Adventure gamebook of life? Who constructed the intricate pathways down which we, the readers/ protagonists travel?

Now that is another, far bigger question, the potential answers to which are multifarious and largely dependent upon one’s spiritual beliefs, upbringing, culture, and religious tradition. Nonetheless, the pondering of such questions is the very basis of philosophical and religious inquiry, and offers us a lens through which to view and interpret the narratives of our existence.

Jupiter Grant is a self-published author, blogger, narrator, and audiobook producer. Buy me a coffee here: https://ko-fi.com/jupitergrant

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