Coffee, Or No Coffee?

Life. It is one of the most magical and most unpredictable things that no one will ever truly understand – no matter how many spirits they believe they can talk to. There are just so many layers to life. It is too complicated for anyone to see through. Whether you have just studied to become a genius chemical engineer like my insanely clever brother, or whether you are like me – completely lost and unsure of the direction you want to take during your journey on Earth. And what are the odds of having two people so different, yet so connected? Sometimes, actually most of the time, we will just never understand the way certain things were selected.

I will never understand why good people are hit with the emotional and physical disaster of cancer. Like a tsunami that hits your world, when you did nothing wrong. You were just there on the beach when the wave came over. Cancer is the same. You were just there living, when the doctors tell you that for no particular reason – your whole world is about to fall apart. What about the bad people who get away with murder. Literally. Why do they get to be set free? Many of us see this as unfair. “Life is unfair kiddo,” we are told. We don’t understand it, and so we just have to accept it.

I will never understand why this force of nature would give a child to the mother who leaves that baby girl in the downtown trash can as she takes her first breath of fresh air. Why are some people born into homes of luxury and love, while others are born into gangs? Natural born killers. What choice do they have, really?

I don’t know if I believe in fate, or destiny. I don’t know if I believe everything is a coincidence. I do know that I have recognised that the choices we make, no matter how tiny, can affect your whole life. If that young woman had just decided to not have her coffee this morning, she would have left ten minutes earlier for work. That out-of-control truck would have not hit her. She would have been alive. But she is not. She is stone cold dead. That is the result of her life: based on one choice. Coffee, or no coffee? This is how our whole life plays out. Each thing that happens is a result of the choices we make previously. Whether these choices are our destiny, or just pure coincidences? Well, that I am not too sure of.

This is what gets to most of us: the not knowing. We don’t know who we are, and we don’t know what we are supposed to be doing. We spend a crazy amount of time, at some point, trying to figure out what the purpose of life is. We go through phases of “I’m trying to find myself”. We waste time on trying to answer all these unanswered questions, that we simply miss out on the authentic magnificence of the mysteries of life. We try to understand the reason for everything that happens, that we don’t appreciate the beauty of the fact that it did happen. The boy who got stabbed, but met his soul mate in the hospital. The girl who was late for the bank by five minutes, and the bank ended up getting robbed. The child who never had one loving family and goes on to write a bestselling book where he meets his wife and has three beautiful children.

We can torture ourselves and question every single situation, asking “what if?” But that isn’t the way I want to go through life. No. I know my purpose in life: to experience it. And have I found myself? No, I haven’t. But that is what I find so beautiful about life. It is not about ‘finding yourself’. It is about ‘creating yourself!’ So I can fully experience life, and get the most out of it, appreciating all the decisions I made that led me to where I am. I am not sure what direction my life will take next, but I am sure that every single random decision I make will direct the way the path will flow. So ask yourself. “Coffee, or no coffee?”