Fate is a slippery and fundamentally suspicious concept.
People talk about it like it’s some grand celestial blueprint — every moment prewritten in triplicate, every chance meeting predetermined, every heartbreak officially stamped and approved by whatever mysterious mid-level bureaucrat operates the machinery of existence from some fluorescent-lit office at the center of the universe.
I have never been able to swallow that story without choking on it.
If fate were real in the neat, laminated, everything-happens-for-a-reason sense that people desperately want to believe — life would be far too organized to be recognizable. The roads would be straight. The lessons would arrive on a published schedule with adequate preparation time. The right decisions would feel obvious and clean instead of terrifying and completely indistinguishable from the wrong ones at three in the morning when you’re the only one awake and the doubt is loud.
But life does not operate like a well-managed transit system.
Life is chaos wearing a trench coat. It’s a thousand small decisions stacked on top of each other like a Jenga tower assembled by someone who’d been drinking since noon. One conversation bleeds into another. One wrong turn deposits you in front of a view you never would have found if you’d stayed obediently on the highway like a sensible person. The whole enterprise is fundamentally, gloriously, sometimes catastrophically unplanned.
And yet.
There are moments that make you stop cold and squint at the architecture of your own life.
Moments where the timing feels too surgical to dismiss as pure accident. The chance meeting that rewires your future completely. The risk you almost talked yourself out of that ends up changing the entire trajectory of everything. The way certain people materialize in your life at the exact coordinates where you needed them — even before you understood you needed anyone at all.
Take my wife.
One decision. One question hanging in the air between two people who had no particular reason to be standing in the same place at the same time. One moment where I could have absolutely kept walking — kept my mouth shut, kept my head down, kept moving like a reasonable and thoroughly alone human being.
If I don’t take that chance, the whole map changes.
No marriage. No shared chaos. No Rowan. A completely different version of this life running in some parallel timeline where I made the sensible choice and kept walking and never knew what I’d passed up.
So was that fate?
Or just a lucky collision of timing and the temporary insanity required to ask a question you’re not sure you want answered?
I lean hard toward the latter.
Because believing in predetermination requires surrendering something I’m fundamentally unwilling to hand over. If the story is already written — if the ending exists somewhere in that cosmic filing cabinet regardless of what you do — then none of the choices actually matter. The risks you took. The doors you kicked open. The moments where you overrode your own fear and did the thing anyway. All of it retroactively meaningless. Just passengers watching the scenery blur past, mistaking the window for agency.
I have never been comfortable in the passenger seat.
What I believe in — what the evidence of my own spectacularly unplanned life keeps insisting is true — is opportunity. Those strange charged crossroads where the universe goes quiet for a moment and puts a choice directly in front of you without explanation or guarantee. Step forward or step back. Say yes or say nothing. Turn left into the unknown or keep driving straight toward the predictable.
Those moments are everything.
Maybe fate isn’t some invisible hand on the wheel steering you toward a destination already entered into the GPS. Maybe it’s just a long series of doors appearing in front of you in the dark, one after another, indefinitely, with no information about what’s behind any of them — just the question of whether you have the nerve to find out.
The people living the most interesting lives aren’t the ones operating from some divine roadmap.
They’re the ones who keep opening doors.
Even — especially — when they have absolutely no idea what’s waiting on the other side. When the hinges are unfamiliar and the room beyond is dark and the only thing pushing them forward is the understanding that standing still in a hallway forever is its own particular kind of death.
So no. I don’t believe destiny writes this story for us.
But I know with absolute conviction that the story gets considerably wilder, richer, and worth telling when you’re willing to grab the page and turn it yourself.
Even when your hands are shaking.
Especially when your hands are shaking.