Determinism and Free Will

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I just finished watching an episode on the show - "The Good Place" which talks about determinism and free will. The episode triggered so many thoughts in me about what I had understood about these concepts from the Bhagawad Gita. The Hindu philosophy talks about "Karma" - cause and effect in human life. Every action has a cause and it will eventually have its effect in an endless cycle of "Samsara" - birth and death. Everything you are doing and going through is a result of your past karma and your present actions determine your future. When I read it for the first time its easy to think that you are trapped and everything in life is pre-determined by your past karma, the circumstances you are born in, your environment, your genetics and that's the entirety of your existence. Where is the place for free will? Does it not exist?
In the show I was talking about earlier, the main character Eleanor is wondering about the same thing and another character (Michael) who is an after life architect tells her that in her after life when he was architecting everything, she (Eleanor) always ended up skewing his plans. And that for him meant that there was free will.
I kept thinking about it, what does this free will look like? And I realized that free will comes from those moments of inspiration we all have at different points of our lives which end up changing the course of our life. Our past might determine our present, but those moments of inspiration will ultimately shape and determine our future.

May we all keep getting inspired by the beauty around us!

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