Dior, Jewel, Bathrooms and Pesto

Even if you don't believe in a formal destiny of some kind, there is an inexorable motion to ones life, a force pushing us along, comprised and concreted by your previous actions, reinforced often by routine and habit, but occasionally smashed and restructured in those rare moments when you decide to step off the beaten path and onto the grassy verge to experience a different way.

And those times lead us into the moments that are our lives, vignettes of existence, of clarity or of distress, of success or loss. We are aware of this force that we are pushed along by, and part of, as each action further cements who we are in our identities, until we are inextricably linked and bound, our minds and our choices becoming utterly inseparable.

We are never more aware of our complete connection with the past than when our actions lead to tragedy, or failure, or worse still, causing direct suffering in the lives of others. We feel responsible, that if we had taken a different path, or chosen another route, that these things would not have come to pass. So often we ignore the good things that come of our actions, either unconcious or otherwise. We find pleasure in laying our finger on a single movement we made and with a pompous air, shouting 'Ha! This, this here is where I changed things', knowing we have more knowledge on what a mouse thinks than of the countless influences that led us to this moment in time.

Strings of coincidence, comprised a little of your own actions, and a little of someone else's, can force events into being that you could never have foreseen. I cannot help but chuckle when I scrape my knee and think of what it took to get to this point.

And then the extraordinary will happen. Some event that is so coincidental it leaves me gasping for breath and reaching for the superstitious to find answers. Something that shakes me to the core, where the hold I have on my own future seems so desperately tenuous in the face of the scant probability that this moment should have ever happened in the first place. 'What control do I have?' I ask, when the best and worst should come about by what seems to be the slimmest chances. A depression will set in, if I let it.


These days, I find myself turning to face these wondrous coincidences head on, as I am so grateful to simply be here in this world, especially when these culminations result in the finest and most beautiful experiences. I approach things with a degree of trepidation and caution, but mostly curiosity, with a heightened appreciation of the string of events and moments and thoughts that led me to this moment, and the awareness that this moment is simply another segment in the path to even more events, and so on, and so on, and so on, for ever and ever.