your two stories resonate with me. as far as taoist philosophy overlaps with buddhism and as far as psychoanalysis overlaps with Frankel's "re-making" meaning out of the card you are dealt.

but as much as these stories are useful to my ability to rationalize and create meaning, i still am interested in whether this type of free will is post-hoc rationalization in which case i am just a piano being played by god or natural order (determinism) or is my free will "really" a capacity to change/alter hardwired stimulus response. if the later is the case, which is my gut feeling, then an even more difficult question arises. if i can alter my behavior how am i to be sure it is not the result of a random generator that makes my behavior seem non-deterministic. the question is...how can one tell the difference between randomness (accompanied by post-hoc rationalization/storytelling) and free will? or perhaps it is enough for free will to equate to randomness...freeing us from strict determinism. maybe free will is our story for the brains capacity to generate randomness?