Someday you will look back and know exactly why it had to happen.

Is this adage a truth, or a romantic notion?

Have you ever looked back at a moment in your life, and felt that what had happened in your past was absolutely necessary for you to be where you are now?

As you contemplated these variables, did the world look to you as if all of the pieces had naturally snapped together in order for you to be, where you are at this moment in time?

When you look at them from opposite directions, timelines are very interesting. When you look forward at various potential details, you are projecting your timeline into the future, and with that projection comes all of the layers of hopes, dreams, expectations, wishes, and fantasies.

Whereas, when we look at a timeline in reverse, we are far more prone to see the metaphorical steppingstones, which lead to our having arrived at our present destination.

This filter amplifies notions of destiny because when we are looking at the timeline in reverse, we put together the intermediate steps that caused us to make one decision or another leaving us with the impression that our core experience was some sort of divinely orchestrated pathway.

As someone who would prefer to believe that there is neither fate nor destiny playing any role in any choice or decision that I make in my life, I find the notion that today’s aphorism is more of a romantic notion, rather than based on facts.

There is a romantic inclination to look at concepts like destiny through the filter of divine providence and the intervention of the gods in favor of ourselves or the protagonist of any story. We enjoy the feeling of the metaphorical hand of God, reaching into the life of a person and triggering their pathway into the future.

When we transpose that same thought onto our own lives, it might be comforting for many to ascribe to the notion that things are preordained, written in the cards, tea leaves or similar, but it has always been my experience that none of that carries any true weight or value when it comes to assessing circumstances and making adjustments or rectifying variables that have proven incongruent with whatever preconceived notion we might have as relates to our ultimate future forecast.

Perhaps one of the greatest, and most reliable scenarios that any of us may depend upon, is that we always have our attitude as the single string to play upon. When you understand that piece of the puzzle, you are all the more ready and capable of taking all of the unknown out of the equation and instead leveraging your own internal energy to bring to bear, whatever actions we have determined appropriate.

When you look back at your pathway to having arrived where you are currently, you may very well see why things had to be the way they are, but you might be remiss in not contemplating that you were highly influential, if not entirely responsible, for how and why that has transpired.

Happy Wednesday!