Moments Like These: When Destiny Decides

Imagine you are travelling towards a destination you planned for. You know the road. You know roughly how long it will take. You have a clear enough picture in your mind of where you are going and what you will find when you arrive.

And then, somewhere along the way, without your permission and without any warning, the road turns. Not because you chose the turn. Because the turn was simply there, and life carried you into it before you had time to object.

And you find yourself, after a while, somewhere you never intended to be. Somewhere more unexpected, more surprising, more quietly right than anywhere your original plan could have taken you.

That is what it feels like when destiny decides your destination. Not fate in the dramatic sense, not thunder and lightning and the feeling of a grand design being revealed. Something much quieter than that. A door that closed. A chance encounter. A wrong turn that turned out to be the right one. A moment when the life you were planning stepped aside and the life that was meant for you walked quietly in.

The difficulty with moments like these is that you almost never recognise them as they happen. You are too close to them, too caught up in the disruption of your original plan, too focused on what you have lost or missed or been redirected from, to see clearly what you have been given instead.

Destiny rarely announces itself on arrival. It works quietly, patiently, through the ordinary material of a life, through accidents and coincidences and unexpected encounters and doors that close at exactly the right time.

And when you see it, when you finally recognise the intelligence in what seemed at the time like chaos or loss or simply bad luck, something shifts. A kind of wonder. A quiet astonishment at the fact that something was working on your behalf even when you could not see it, even when you were resisting it, even when you were certain that the turn in the road was a mistake. It was not a mistake. It was the journey.

Sometimes the turn looks like an ending: a relationship that breaks, a job that disappears, a plan that collapses. In the moment, it can feel like failure or loss. But look back along the arc of a life, and you will often find that the door that closed made a space for a different room, one you would not have entered by choice, yet one that fits you more truly than the corridor you were walking down.

There is something deeply freeing about truly accepting this. Not as a passive resignation to whatever happens, but as an active trust in the turns you did not choose. Because if the unexpected turns of your life have brought you, time and again, to places more right and more rich than anything your planning could have managed, then perhaps the planning is not the whole story.

Perhaps alongside your own intentions and efforts and carefully made choices, something else is also at work. Something that sees the whole road when you can only see the next few steps. Something that knows, even when you don’t, where you are going.

This does not mean everything that happens is easy or painless or immediately comprehensible. The turns can be hard, even painful. The disruption to your original plan can cost you something real. But look back at the full arc of your life, at all the turns you did not choose, all the detours and redirections and unexpected arrivals, and ask yourself honestly: Where did they take you? What did they give you that your plan never could have? Who did you become in the spaces between where you were going and where you ended up?

The painting for this final post in the Moments Like These series is the most luminous in the series:  gold moving freely across white, warm pink arriving where it wants to arrive, the whole surface alive with the energy of something unplanned and unhurried and completely itself.

There is no fixed destination in this painting. There is only the movement, joyful, spontaneous, trusting, of paint finding its own way across the canvas. The way a life finds its way when you loosen your grip on where you thought you were going.

Close your eyes. Bring to mind one unplanned turn. Notice where you feel it in your body: tightness, warmth, relief. Stay with that sensation for three breaths.

Think of a turn in your life that you did not choose. One that took you somewhere you never planned to go. And think of where it led. The people it brought you to. The version of yourself it made possible. The life you are living now that would not exist without that unexpected turn.

Can you feel, beneath the gratitude, the quiet wonder of it, that something was working on your behalf all along, even when you couldn’t see it?

This is the third and final painting and blog post in Moments Like These, completing the fourth series in this body of work.

You can also read the earlier posts in this series- Seeing With the Soul and Two Souls, Complete. The three earlier series, Missing Puzzle Piece, Between Two Points and Oblivious and Untold, are also available on this blog.

Thank you for travelling this road with me, all of it, from the very first step to the final arrival. I hope somewhere along the way, something found its way to you.