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Only two things are always true:  The past is gone; the future is unavoidable.  More specifically, the future is predetermined.  What will happen has already been decided by the same fundamental laws that keep us safely on the ground.  We cannot decide our own futures, and there is no one making the future for us – time simply pushes forward on its own, apathetic and unaware, beyond our control.  Like everything else, the passage of time is cause and effect, an equation that we have yet to understand... perfection, beyond our reach, beyond our comprehension, barely visible on the fringes of our imagination.

Is free will, then, an illusion?  Perhaps.  But so long as we are ignorant of what is to come, we can still decide our futures for ourselves, even if something larger is really pulling the strings.  Maybe our decisions are predetermined by who we are and what happens around us, and maybe we're only variables in the equation... but what difference does it make if we never know?  Maybe it's all in our heads... but does that make it any less real?