Is it fate that the boy you’re falling head-over-heels for just happens to have math class in the same exact lecture hall right after you? Or is it simply a meaningless coincidence, one prone to causing hours and hours of lament and grief at the missed possibility?
Author Milan Kundera’s passage from, “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” offers a more liberating and inspiring perspective on those lucky coincidences and chance situations that we encounter on a daily basis:
“Our day-to-day life is bombarded with fortuities or, to be more precise, with the accidental meetings of people and events we call coincidences…It is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in his daily life. For he thereby deprives his life of a dimension of beauty.”
By trying to classify moments of our lives as being either a coincidence or an act of fate, we systematically one-dimensionalize instances that are otherwise beautiful and memorable.
A series of coincidences are sometimes just coincidences, but merely shrugging them off and refusing to acknowledge them means missing out on something special. Sure, it may have just been a coincidence that the day you decided to go to your professor’s office hours, he or she got to enjoy their favorite breakfast, putting them in a happy and helpful mood. However, contemplating events and their direct effect on your situation in that moment can add a dimension of beauty to any seemingly unimportant moment in life.
Maybe it was just coincidence, but it still merits appreciation and recognition as something unique and significant to you.
Instead of spending hours on the phone with your best friend trying to figure out if it was fate that your teacher’s seating chart placed you next to the cutest guy in class, just enjoy it. Don’t thank the universe for its purposeful, magical manipulation of seating charts; instead, accept the randomness of simple chance situations and utilize them to your own advantage.
We feed so much valuable time and so many valuable thoughts to the monster of over-analysis, trying to figure out the root and cause of accidental encounters in our life. In this mindset, we often end up detesting that mysterious thing that happened to us and downplaying ourselves for making it out to be more or less than it was.
What that chance fortuity means or doesn’t mean isn’t for the universe or us to decide. It’s for us to relish, enjoy, and appreciate as another beautiful dimension of our lives. It’s for us to look at and appreciate as a moment worthwhile and immensely special. So, the next time I run into my crush outside of my math lecture, I’ll smile because I got to see him, and I’ll eagerly await the next lecture for the chance to smile again.