There are those who say that things happen for a reason, that things fall into place the way they’re supposed to in order to fulfill a greater plan. Then there are those who say that life is purely random, that things occur haphazardly and there is no plan at all. Those in the former camp believe in destiny and fate. Those in the latter camp believe in luck and coincidences.
Those in the former camp say that
all of our hardships will one day make sense, that we need to go through them
to ultimately arrive at a better place.
Then they launch into an explanation of how they would never have gotten
to such-and-such a place if they hadn’t gone through certain (often difficult)
circumstances that led them to take the action they took. Those in the latter camp say that it only
seems that way because “hindsight is 20/20,” and of course if we look back on
things we can always see a path that wasn’t really there but seems to be there
now because we’re looking through the maze backward.
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| Connecting the dots . . . |
I believe that at a certain point,
if we’re lucky, we make the connection, and this connection usually comes with
age, if it comes at all. Only age can
give us the experience of walking down that same road over and over, which
eventually endows us with the power of prediction if we’re paying
attention. Only age can give us that
“aha moment” when we realize that the horrible thing that happened was, indeed,
a blessing in disguise. And only age can
give us the ability to be grateful for our tragedies, to be patient in our
losses because they, too, shall pass and in their wake something new will be
born.
Every human being is born with the
ability to make the connection, to see the hidden golden web that connects
everything to everything else, but not every human being will understand that
ability or hone that skill. Many will
complain bitterly at their fate, and many will wipe their brow at their narrow
escape. Only a few will make the bigger
connection and see the web and its interrelatedness.
It begins when you realize that there
are no coincidences in life. It begins
when you realize that two events that were so dramatically different from one
another, that had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with one another, were in
fact two sides of the same coin and complementary in every way. The timeline means nothing to the Great
Alchemist. Man’s measurement of events
and their duration and intervals is unique to man, who has the need to be
quantitative. Those who make the
connection begin to see that time is an illusion, and events on the timeline
occur instantaneously and simultaneously.
The older we get the more we make
the connection that there is absolutely no way whatsoever we could have gotten
from point A to point B without the path having already been laid out. The web works perfectly.
