I believe in fixed points of time. Free will is rampant, and daily choices are made at the micro-level in the span of a nanosecond, but in the ever-evolving tapestry of life, some points are tied up by fate in advance, destined to make a knotted appearance no matter what the thread before it chooses to be, or do. A butterfly may decide to flap into a tornado, and all of China could jump up and down at the same time, and a little girl could blow dandelion fluff straight into a morning rain cloud, but none of these things would stop the world from sneezing-or make it quake-if the movement or stillness was a fixed point of time.
Moments, like choices, are sometimes unnoticed and often small, but never unimportant. Some of the most vital, ancient knots of destiny pass us by in a precious blink. A breath of life. A step forward. A signature. A smile.
Growing up. I was told we could often perceive these moments by paying attention to the appearance of extraordinary patterns in ordinary life. No matter how many threads-or how different they are-the closer to the core of kismet-kissed knot- the more they interrupt each other's stories. The tangles standout. Not so much at a cosmic level, but definitely from the perspective of one frayed part of one small string. In those moments, I find comfort. From my micro-view of Everything Ever, I can see that nothing I did or had done to me threw life-as-we-know-it wildly off course. Here, this, now-is exactly where I am meant to be.
You have probably experienced the phenomenon too. It works like this:
On Monday, you dream of yellow roses, for no good reason. Maybe you've never even seen a yellow rose. On Tuesday, a stranger whistles "Yellow Rose of Texas" till you want to step on his toe to make it stop. Later that day, your car breaks down and you wait on a road you've never travelled-right beside a wild yellow rose bush. It makes you smile and that moment is your intuitive understanding that this is your part in the knot. The string of yellow roses was just temporarily twisted into your path, held tightly next to your journey. A glorious glitch in the Universe's great show.
And you had front row seats.
I've experienced these twists with alarming frequency lately and it's made me wonder how many glitches the dinosaurs witnessed before confronted with the fatal pop that faded them from emperors to memories. Destiny is happily ambivalent to the casualties if their manifestations. But that's a worry best left to a more connected strand, or better yet-the Weaver, the maker of looms, the mother of fate herself. The best I can do is string along and not be frayed down by the passing or fixing of time. And-when lucky enough to catch the fates at work, bear witness to the journeys threaded through my own, take notice-and applaud. Casualties aside, destiny deserves all the credit due any great artist. Fate is a marvelous choreographer, and life is a frightfully wondrous show.
