A little something called fate
The signs are there — are you open to receiving them?
There’s something beautiful about April in New York City. The days are often gray, but you’re occasionally rewarded with deep blue skies and a warmth that beckons you to discard your jacket in favor of a t-shirt.
Winter is holding on, but spring is arriving.
It’s one of these days, and S and I are walking through Upper West Side. Past plots of blooming poppies in rich yellows and reds that earnestly scrub away the dreary gray of winter. Though the cement and concrete remain, they seem to sparkle a touch more.
We pass Fred’s, past packed tables of people sitting outside for dinner. Plates stacked with, to S’s admission, mediocre overpriced bar food.
I’ve missed you New York!
I ask S:
“How many people do you think are on first dates tonight in New York City?”
It’s one of those dumb questions you’d get asked in a consulting (or my professional fraternity) interview that supposedly proves you’re intelligent. Because apparently, intelligence is being able to logic your way into an answer. Let’s not kid ourselves, it’s nothing more than a dart toss in the dark.
Okay, New York City’s population is eight million.
“How many are of dating age?”
Let’s say half. Four million.
“How many are single and are actively dating?”
A quarter. A million.
“How many could be on dates tonight?”
A tenth. A hundred thousand.
“It’s a Monday, let’s discount for that.”
A quarter. Twenty-five thousand.
“That sounds too high, let’s discount again.”
Fifteen thousand people. Seventy-five hundred potential couples.
How many would go on second dates? Maybe twenty percent, so fifteen hundred. Of those, how many would go onto something meaningful? You know, a few years of dating or something. Maybe a handful. How many would get married — they’ve met their partner, their soulmate?
Maybe one. If that.
Two out of fifteen thousand. Two out of eight million. You can see how the odds are stacked forever against your favor to meet the love of your life. Even when you’ve got the advantage of a densely packed metropolitan city full of young people searching for the same thing!
All this logic. All this “intelligence.” All fail. There’s an infinitesimal fraction of a percentage of meeting someone at the exact moment, under the exact conditions in life you’re both able to connect in a way where separation dissolves, and your hearts transmit “We are one.”
How do you explain the unexplainable?
//
Western society has little reverence, much less patience, for fate. We’re so engrained and conditioned by our minds to rely on neat little concepts and ideas, that we miss the magic of life at its finest in front of our eyes. On the seats we sit on. The air we breathe.
A lust for control isn’t exclusive to Westerners, but more prevalent. As we’ve become more industrialized and modern, we’ve lost touch with the stories once used to explain life’s happenings. Stories that, despite their explanations, still arrive at the same conclusion.
Life is out of our control.
However, Western societies are built on the premise that individual effort carves a path toward a chosen fate, rather than fate determining the path of the chosen individual.
But when you consider the most meaningful, magical moments in your life, how did they unfold? Was there any clear explanation or logic? A clear mapping of steps you consciously plotted to arrive at this exact moment?
It may feel like there was a high degree of agency, but when you zoom out of your own orbit, you realize all you did was toss a dart in the dark, and something beyond guided the trajectory.
//
During my last two weeks in Valencia, I stayed at an Air BnB. My original roommate let his Dutch friend, J, stay in his room during the second week. The first morning, we bumped shoulders in the kitchen, playing conversation on beginner mode. Though we started with “What do you do?”, it quickly unfolded into a discussion on authenticity and living from the heart, rather than the mind.
I left with a sense there was more depth to be explored — how much?
Only don’t know.
A few days later, we’d go out for paella in Ruzzafa. Shelling out $40 for some overpriced black rice that quickly grew cold in the cast-iron serving pan. Nice to know I can still experience New York City dining anywhere I go!
Thankfully, the conversation made up for the food. We had the most enriching, flavorful conversation of my seven months of solo traveling. Bar none. Discussing topics and ideas I hadn’t with anyone else other than the pages of my journal — who at this point, I’m surprised has stuck around.
There’s a quote I love that goes:
“You can only meet someone as deeply as you’ve met yourself.”
As we served up questions back and forth, the depths continued to illuminate.
All that remained was light.
The odds of this happening, especially on a first interaction, are near zero. Factor in it happened at the literal tail-end of this travel chapter — what the fuck? It’s mind-blowing.
In a typical attempt to corral life into understanding, we’d chalk this up to “coincidence” or “small world.”
“This is crazy.”
I used to utter when I began to experience moments of magic. Synchronicity. They made no sense. How is it that the truer I am, the more Life presents me with what I’m asking for? Yearning for?
Be with this question. You’ll reach a certain point where there’s too much evidence — case closed. Throw your hands up, erase the chalkboard carrying all your logic, and let go of making sense of life.
Life is.
The more I've surrendered to this truth, the more I realize the signs have been there all along, guiding me to this moment, writing to you.
Reading When Breath Becomes Air, the memoir of a dying man, led me to muse on death and living a meaningful and fulfilling life.
Working on Wall Street, life felt devoid of meaning and fulfillment. In the absence of purpose, I came across Ikigai — a Japanese idea on “your purpose for being.”
Realizing my purpose, I remembered my childhood dream of being a YouTuber — a vehicle to serve my purpose. Now considering deviating from the default paths in life, lo and behold, I came across a book called Pathless Path…
Here we are.
The more we surrender, the more we allow life to bloom into all its majesty — all our majesty. Putting ourselves on an invisible path fate has mapped out for us, chosen for us, all along.
Look for the signs, they’re there. Whether a person, a book, or the way your toast burns.
Look beyond them, you’ll find Life smiling back at you.
May I say?
The word Fate, I think, implies something fixed.
The Buddhist understanding of the word, karma, may express what you so beautifully describe.
Not “my bad” karma or “their good” karma, but the understood and practiced meaning. That is, what our conditioning coming to us from time immemorial which exists with us on the cellular level and every level, unless we see it and intentionally practice reacting differently.
We don’t disagree, just “think” different thoughts about why things happen.
Having written that, I hope you pursue communications which seemed to lie in the no man’s land of the impossible and buck your expectations.
You deserve the very best. You are The Best.
True. When we allow Providence to guide us, we may stumble serendipitously along unanticipated paths and end up with the riches we weren't even looking for.