Daily Prompt: Time Can’t Be Rewritten

DP Asks: Do you believe in fate or do you believe you can control your own destiny?

Answer: Yes and yes…. Also no.

There’s an episode of Doctor Who I really like, on series 4, where Donna Noble is taken back to the moment that led to her first encounter with The Doctor, and pushed into taking a different path. It shows everything that never happened because she wasn’t there to stop him, to save him (quite literally),  on that occasion. It’s one of my favorite ‘alternate reality’ episodes of any show I’ve ever seen. Donna Noble is one of my favorite companions because of that characteristic of her; she doesn’t see the impact she makes on the Doctor, and the lives she touches on her travels with him. After everything she still thinks of herself as insignificant and in the end; a couple of episodes later, even though she saves the world, the Doctor is forced to make her forget in order to save her life. 

So yes: I love Doctor Who, but this isn’t about that today. The point is… Donna’s story in Doctor Who is the very definition of the human condition; we are so much greater than we’ll ever give ourselves credit for. The things you say and do or even write and post on the internet, you can’t know what effect they have in other lives… What if I decide that this post is crap and just not publish it at all? It’s a small thing, it looks that way to me, but what if it isn’t? I don’t know, you don’t know, and until the day we die we probably never will. I believe that there are turning points, crossroads, important decisions we make everyday that will always remain small in our minds and memories… Are we really as insignificant as we think we are? Who knows, maybe we’re saving the world somehow and we’ll just never know any better. I know, because I have, that right this moment someone is asking themselves if the world would be a better place if they had never existed… Maybe it would, but are you really willing to take that chance?

I read a lot of articles and watched a few YouTube videos in which people discuss what the purpose is to life, and what faith entails, how it relates to Fate and whether or not the existence of God has to do with it. I personally see Fate as all of the things that happen just out of our line of sight, things we can’t and shouldn’t see: The unknown consequences of our choices and actions. So in a way we write it ourselves, but at the same time it is completely out of our hands. Fate is the ghost we leave behind as we move forward; our footprints in the sand, at every step we take something shifts beneath our feet and leaves a mark… Even after we are gone they show that we were there at some point. One day we’ll stop and look back, we’ll see those footprints and we’ll think ‘look how far I’ve come’, we’ll wonder how did we ever get here… It won’t matter; we’re already there. That’s Fate; the little unimportant things we all do, and how much greater they seem once we realize where they’ve taken us. We don’t see it happen, we make blind choices, and most times we only get to see the whole picture when it’s too late to change it… Sometimes we never get to see it at all.

Fate is the knowledge that time can never be rewritten… Except by a madman in a blue police box.

B.B