‘You know how it is. Sometimes we plan a trip to one place but something takes us to another.’

This journey has been a continuous flow, like an upward current of emotion. Aiming is useless – we only ever land where we’re supposed to, our boat hitting shores we never knew existed, pieces that fall into place with grace. Roads that once led to dead-ends lead to free-ways when revisited years later. How would you know if you hadn’t turned that corner?

Mistakes of the past are rarely that – in retrospect, they’re the saving grace that bumps us from a dead-end path to the one we were meant to be on. The one that goes on. We’re always so caught up with what didn’t work out, the kismet of it is lost on us. So we print screen moments to remember them. We browse hashtags looking for a connection, a feeling. A sign that we’re going the right way – a reassurance that the directions we got will actually get us to where we hope to find ourselves.

They say that everything happens for a reason. I don’t know about everything, but I know that what matters, does. There is purpose in inexplicable events, like how a stranger’s words can take you on a journey inside yourself, into places you always thought you’d need a passport to reach. If you hadn’t met, would you have ever ventured that far? Seen inside the quiet rooms deep inside yourself that hold the answers you’ve been looking for? Or a lost love that breaks your heart, placing cracks and dents where, years later, the light of your life seeps through. When I look into Ayla’s eyes, I recognize someone I’ve known my whole life. In that dimension of the metaphysical where souls live perpetually, unencumbered yet by a physical body, we had met long ago and I had known then, like I do now, that she was meant for me. My head spins with the possibility, my heart gets drunk. How can that be? The only compass I had were my intentions – if you follow that, the rest falls into place – with grace.

**

She flicks her cigarette away from herself. I watch the evidence scatter in the wind, falling where they may – falling where they’re meant. Almost every pages of my Rumi book is bent and dog-eared, giving the impression that I have found every word on every page to be of severe importance. Words dance on the grainy paper like dervishes. They tell stories of men guided by candle light, roaming the streets during the day, looking for meaning they’re incapable of seeing. A reminder that the wandering of your kismet can be as transparent as the skin that keeps it all inside you. Trust the flow, swim with the current. There is comfort in this continuous helplessness –  embrace it by the heart.

**

Photo: St Sebastian, Spain, 2014