Choice Vs Destiny

People always tell me that life is a compromise and i always retort back saying that life is a choice. But i guess the answer lies somewhere in the middle. Neither everything is a compromise nor everything is choice. There are certain things which you decide by choice and there are certain things where you have no voice. For example I can definitely have my say in what am going to study, whom am goin to marry, how many kids am going to have (not always but most of the times) but I don have a say when it comes to nature-earthquakes, floods, weather etc. But I want to figure out to what extent are our lives governed by the choices we make. The majority of people believe that there is very little choice in life, they leave every thing to so called destiny. They always say that am destined to do my engineering, am destines to marry Miss J ( no this is not the J from previous post), am destined to do this and do that. The saddest part of such attitude is they never realize that there existed a choice and when they are unhappy during later part of their lives they blame it on destiny rather than taking ownership of the situation they are in. It works perfectly well fo them because they feel they have done nothing wrong and it all went wrong cos it was destined to go wrong. But the most important question would be is it right to live this way? When we are presented with a situation shouldn we rationally analyse it and figure out what choices we have got and see what are consequences of each choice and then select which suits the best. There are many advantages with this approach because one thing we are most of the times in control of our lives and these choices work the way we want them to in most of the cases and another thing is we can always rationally justify the choices we make if such a need arises. And ofourse there is always a danger of making a wrong choice but thats alright we can always retrospect as to what went wrong, this is atleast much better than not knowing why we are where we are.I believe that 90% times in life we have a choice and the rest probably is a compromise. There are so many things in life we can choose, we can choose what to study, where to live, to pick our friends, to choose the life partner, what kind of work we want to do etc. It takes a lot of courage to choose because some of the choices may not be time tested, they may not have any emprical weightage, but if your rational faculties say that its the best fit then why not go for it?

I donno who said this but I would like to quote a few lines.

"I wish I had the serenity to accept the things I cant change, Knowledge to change the things I can and wisdom to differentiate between the two."