Rukmini asked Lord Krishna, after the battle of Kurukshetra, “Hey Prabhu, Guru Dronacharya and Bhishma were scholars with a lifetime of righteousness behind them. Why did they have to die in the war?” Lord Krishna replied, “Devi, you are right, both of them are very learned and righteous, but both of them made a wrong choice which destroyed the fruits of the righteousness they practised throughout their lives. They both were elders present in the court of Hastinapur when Draupadi was being disrobed. They had the authority to stop the outrage but chose to turn a blind eye. This single crime overshadowed their lifetime of righteousness”.
Our life is a matter of choices and the choices have consequences. In the poem "The Road Not Taken" by Robert Frost, he says “Two roads diverged in a wood and I took the one less travelled by and that has made all the difference”. It allows one to think about choices in life, whether to be with the mainstream or go off-beat.
Our friends are our choice while chance makes our parents. Thus choice and chance converge to make our lives. William Shakespeare implied that chance favours only the prepared mind when he wrote in his play, Henry V: “All things are ready if our minds be so.” A famous example of the prepared mind is that of Isaac Newton when the famed apple fell from the tree, leading to his musings about the nature of gravitation.
Another chance of discovery is attributed to Penicillin. Sir Alexander Fleming was experimenting with the influenza virus in 1928. He left for a two-week vacation and returned to find that a mould had contaminated his staphylococcus cultures. But more importantly, he found that the bacteria were unable to grow anywhere near the mold. His keen observation and analysis resulted in the making of the antibiotic penicillin and would change the world of medicine forever.
We generally take credit for our successes and blame destiny for our failures. But destiny is not a matter of chance but a matter of choice we make, determined by our circumstances. Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “Work and acquire, and thou hath chained the wheel of Chance”.