The following are theoretical questions, and sure to invite a lot of what my good friend John Valby refers to as Philosophical BS. But here they are anyway: How much of the course of our individual lives do we have control over? And how much is predetermined?

Some bold individuals – the ones who fancy themselves as “taking life by the horns” – will argue that they control 100% of what happens in their lives (though they might lower it 99% if challenged, conceding that real accidents do happen once in a while). They don’t have patience for those who look for excuses as to why things might have gone bad in their lives. You make your bed, and you lie in it.

Others might argue that life is largely accidental and unpredictable – an accumulation of random events. There is no seeing beyond the curve in the river, and we are subject to the moods of the current propelling us. There is no grand scheme, no rhyme nor reason. We float onward, until we become the flotsam and jetsam of some wayward boat moored on a muddy bank.

Let’s put it another way. Is life more of a journey or a destination?

To believe in destiny is to accept that we are part of something already in the making. The future has been decided, and because we are incapable of knowing it, we try to make the best of what has been revealed. Positive thinking and faith allow us to see life as a mystical adventure wherein we search for divine clues. Everything happens for a reason. But without faith, we might see it as a master script in which we are “poor players who strut and fret our hour upon the stage” until someone pulls the curtain.

Young people especially like the idea of life as a journey. It is the story yet to be told! You are the star, the rolling stone, the one who is willing to take risks, to throw caution to the wind as you get ready to set sail to parts unknown. It’s about finding who you really are and what you can become if you just open your arms to what’s possible.

Whatever your philosophical or religious mindset, one thing we can all agree on is that no one lives forever. We are bound to meet our maker – we just don’t know when and where that will happen. But what if we did know? What if we possessed the gift of prescience – of being able to see into the future?

I’m not talking here about Nostradamus or Orwell or any other creative metaphysician, writer or illusionist who made a living through their imaginings. I’m asking, what if some individual discovers that he has the ability to see in his mind’s eye events he knows for certain will happen, even his own death? I think it would be a curse, a constant haunting of the spirit, an unwelcome shadow that follows too close, always leaning in, never switching forward or back, heeding no light source.

While it is unlikely that anyone has ever seen events of the future with perfect clarity, there have been men and women haunted by dreams or intuition; they sensed the dark valley that lay before them. Abraham Lincoln dreamed of a shrouded corpse lying on a catafalque in a room in the White House. Martin Luther King Jr. confided in one of his aides about feelings of imminent doom; moreover, his last speech, in which he declares himself having “been to the mountaintop,” might be construed as foreshadowing his death. And Jesus, soon after his transfiguration on a much older mountaintop, proclaimed: “The Son of Man will be delivered into the hands of men” (Mathew 17:22).

No one can adequately explain the tragic deaths of these three great men. Was it all part of God’s plan? Or were they simply victims of consequence? All I know is that they were willing to put themselves in harm’s way in hopes that the “better angels” of the human heart would one day prevail. And they might have sensed that for us to hear those angels, we must bear witness to the ugliest, meanest parts of our human nature. Only then can we resolve to make the world better.

Pete Howard, a musician, writer, teacher, and painter, lives in Dunkirk.