Orí and the Stoic cylinder: does a destiny you chose make you more free or less?
In Yoruba thought, before birth each person chooses an orí, literally a "head", meaning the inner self that carries one's destiny. One of the words for destiny, àkúnlẹ̀yàn, means something like "that which was chosen kneeling". You chose it, but you cannot remember choosing it, and once born you cannot exchange it.
My grandmother used this to explain both success and misfortune. It always struck me as a strange mixture: fate, because the destiny is fixed before you act; and freedom, because it was your choice. There are also stories where a person's effort, or neglect, makes a good destiny fail or a poor one improve, so the fixing is not total.
Recently a friend sent me Chrysippus's cylinder, the Stoic image reported by Cicero: push a cylinder and it rolls, push a cone and it spins, because how a thing moves depends on its shape, not only on the push. Fate supplies the push; character supplies the shape.
Both pictures try to make room for responsibility inside a fixed order. But they do it differently. The Stoic says the shape is you; the Yoruba says the destiny was chosen by you. I am curious whether people think either succeeds, and whether there are other traditions with a third way of doing it.