“The moment you notice a connection between events, you start to believe it’s all somehow cosmic,” my husband said once. “Like they’re happening for you.”

His words stuck with me. They carried an unspoken criticism that maybe I assign too much meaning to ordinary events. That maybe I see divine purpose where there’s only coincidence. That I find intention where there might be nothing but random circumstances.

Maybe he’s right. But I also know that I’m not wrong.

Noticing Patterns

Through years of careful observation, I’ve come to believe that everything in life is cosmic and predestined. All of it.

I believe in joy that arrives as surprise and losses that crack us open to reveal what we never knew we contained. I believe in pauses that feel like punishment but later show themselves as preparation. I believe in people who appear exactly when we need them most and ones who vanish before we feel ready to let them go. I believe in detours that seem to lead nowhere but eventually circle back to show us what we didn’t know we were seeking. I even believe in delays that look like denial but prove to be protection in disguise.

There are forces beyond our immediate understanding. These forces orchestrate our encounters with exactly what we’re meant to experience. We’re not drifting through a universe of random events. Instead, we’re participating in something deliberately shaped, something sacred.

This isn’t wishful thinking or a story I’ve constructed to make sense of chaos. This is a truth that revealed itself to me through experience. The story of how I met my husband illustrates this perfectly.

The Night Destiny Spoke

Late August, summer of 2019. My friends and I had just finished a night out in Gastown. We were walking through downtown Vancouver, laughing and talking as we made our way through the quiet streets. The glass towers around us reflected the city lights. When we reached the corner of Robson and Howe, we paused under a streetlight, casually debating our routes home.

That’s when I heard it. A voice, clear and unmistakable. I’m not sure where it came from, possibly somewhere deep within my own consciousness, speaking with an authority I had never experienced before.

“Go talk to him.“

I actually said out loud: “Talk to who?”

Then I saw him, just to my left, walking past us with the easy stride of someone heading home after a fun night. He was alone and unhurried, moving through the quiet streets with contentment.

Without thinking, I stepped forward. “Hi,” I said, catching his attention.

He stopped, surprised but already smiling, as if he had been expecting this interruption all along.

What followed was a conversation that felt both spontaneous and inevitable. It was warm, flirty, and slightly surreal, in the way meaningful encounters often are. He told me he had been out celebrating his best friend Pat’s birthday, starting at the Canadians baseball game and ending at The Roxy. Somehow, that entire chain of choices and circumstances had delivered him to that exact corner at that exact moment when I would be there to hear the voice that told me to speak.

We shared a cigarette between us, passing it back and forth while we talked. We exchanged the particular softness that passes between strangers who recognize something familiar in each other.

Then my taxi arrived.

Just before I stepped into the car, he made an unusual request that would change everything.

“Promise me something,” he said, his voice carrying a weight I didn’t yet understand.

“Promise what?“

“Take my number. And promise me you’ll call me in the morning. Can you do that?“

We shared a kiss goodbye. Then I disappeared into the back seat and watched him grow smaller through the rear window, not knowing that this moment would become the origin story of my marriage.

The Promise That Rewrote My Life

The next morning, my friend asked whether I intended to call that guy from the downtown corner. The question hung in the air while I considered my options. I could let the moment fade into the category of beautiful encounters that live only in memory. I could chalk it up to a fun night and move on with my life unchanged.

Instead, I heard myself saying, “A promise is a promise,” and felt a strange anticipation building in my chest.

So I called him. He answered with the polite attention of someone trying to place a half-remembered voice, and I could hear the slight confusion in his tone.

Nervously, I launched into my questions: “Hi, how are you? What are you up to today?”

He answered everything I asked with sincere kindness, engaging in conversation even though I could sense something was off. Finally, he paused and said, with what sounded like heartfelt apology: “I’m sorry. I actually don’t remember you. I don’t really remember much from last night.”

The admission hit me like cold water.

He didn’t remember me? Not the conversation, not the kiss, not even the dress I had chosen so carefully for that evening? My mind began its familiar spiral toward invisibility and insignificance, crafting the story of how I must have been forgettable, unremarkable, just another face in a night that meant nothing.

But then he said something that stopped my spiral in its tracks: “Let’s connect on Facebook.”

He looked me up while we were still on the phone. And to his visible relief, I was, in his words, “really cute.” His entire tone shifted, warming with recognition and interest. “I’ll call you later this week. Let’s go out to dinner. How does that sound?”

That Friday, we went to Burgoo on Main Street.

The date lasted forty-eight hours. We were completely drawn to each other. Dinner was enjoyable and full of laughter, followed by a visit to a friend’s art show. It was endless fun. We just wanted more of each other, it was electrifying. So the date continued on.

It was the beginning of something real, something that would prove to have roots and staying power. Something that, years later, would become marriage.

Why I Cannot See Life Any Other Way

So yes, you could say I see life through a cosmic lens. But really, how could I not?

That moment at Robson and Howe contains too many impossibilities to dismiss as coincidence. The voice that spoke with such clarity and authority, directing me toward a stranger who would become my husband. The timing that brought us to the same corner at the same moment after entirely different evenings. The night of forgetting followed by remembering, as if the universe needed to test whether this connection could survive even the erasure of memory.

None of it was random. It was something older than chance, something that operates according to laws we don’t yet understand. It was alignment made manifest, the universe quietly stitching something together in the darkness while we went about our ordinary business of living.

And I listened. That’s the crucial part of this story. I listened to the voice, and I acted on what I heard.

The Difference Between Vision and Delusion

I understand it’s not always easy to explain this perspective to someone who doesn’t experience life this way. Especially someone who assumes that events simply happen, we react and adapt, and that constitutes the entirety of the story. From that vantage point, belief in cosmic design can appear to be avoidance, magical thinking, or a refusal to accept reality in its unvarnished form.

I understand that viewpoint, and I even welcome the challenge it presents because it forces me to examine my beliefs with rigour.

Blind belief without careful reflection can indeed be dangerous. Not everything carries a message, and not every pain contains a prophecy. There exists a crucial difference between being in authentic conversation with life and attempting to force it into a tidy narrative. There is a distinction between grace and fantasy, between spiritual insight and spiritual bypassing.

But my belief is not a fantasy, and it is not a spiritual bypass.

It is a way of staying awake. It is a way of noticing the subtle currents that run beneath the surface of ordinary experience. It is a way of meeting life not as something to endure, but as something that speaks back when we learn how to listen.

Presence, Not Passivity

When my husband suggests that I see too much meaning in ordinary events, I believe he speaks from a place of genuine care. Perhaps he wants to protect me from disappointment, from overreach, from the disillusionment that can come when life fails to live up to the beauty I assign it. Maybe he fears that seeing life as mystical means avoiding responsibility or surrendering agency, becoming passive in the face of circumstances.

But the truth is this: my belief has never made me passive. It has made me present.

When I trust that something greater is unfolding, I stop resisting what is happening and begin to meet my life with reverence, even when I cannot understand the terrain I’m crossing. I listen more carefully to the subtle guidance that surrounds us. I soften without losing my strength, and I pay attention not to control outcomes, but to deepen my participation in what is already happening.

This doesn’t mean I sit back and wait for fate to deliver me a completed life. It means I stay aware of what’s happening around me while making my own choices. I move forward with purpose, but I don’t try to force things to happen. I trust that what’s meant for me will come, and what isn’t will naturally fall away.

The Questions Worth Asking

What if the people who dismiss cosmic thinking as naive are actually the ones avoiding something essential? What if their insistence on randomness is its own form of protection against the overwhelming responsibility that comes with believing we are here for a purpose?

Because if things are truly predestined, if we really do have soul agreements and karmic threads weaving through our days, then every choice matters exponentially more. Every relationship becomes a classroom designed for our specific growth. Every challenge becomes curriculum tailored to teach us what we most need to learn. Every moment of beauty becomes a reminder of what we’re participating in.

The skeptics worry that believing in cosmic design makes us passive. But what if the opposite is true? What if believing that nothing matters beyond our immediate choices is what makes us small, what allows us to sleepwalk through our days without truly engaging with the mystery of existence?

I think about the voice I heard that night. Where did it come from? How did it know what I needed to do? And more importantly, how many other voices do I miss because I’m not listening carefully enough, because I’m too busy dismissing the possibility that life might be speaking to me?

The Deeper Question

I have come to understand that I came here with soul agreements and karmic threads already woven into the fabric of my existence. I recognize that I am not discovering who I am so much as remembering it, peeling away the layers of conditioning and fear to reveal what was always true. But more than that, I know we all did.

The question isn’t whether life is cosmic. The question is whether we’re brave enough to live as if it is.

Because when you truly understand that everything is connected, that every encounter has been arranged, that every loss is somehow in service of your becoming, then you can’t sleepwalk through your days anymore. You can’t treat people as disposable or dismiss pain as meaningless or beauty as accidental.

You have to show up. You have to pay attention. You have to trust that your life is not a random sequence of events but a carefully crafted invitation to remember who you really are.

And if that lens seems too mystical for someone else, I can live with that.

Because this way of seeing, this sacred perspective, is not a delusion I use to avoid life’s difficulties. It is the truth that allows me to meet life as it is, with awe and attention and the kind of reverence that transforms ordinary moments into something approaching prayer.

I acknowledge that I cannot explain why some people’s stories seem to end in tragedy or why suffering appears to have the final word in certain lives. I am speaking here only to the experiences of alignment and grace that have shaped my understanding. Perhaps there are different kinds of cosmic timing, different lessons, different purposes that I cannot yet comprehend. What I can speak to is what I have witnessed: moments of perfect synchronicity that feel too intentional to dismiss as coincidence.

The real question is: If you haven’t yet already, are you listening?

In a world that often feels chaotic and random, what would change if you truly believed that everything was happening for you rather than to you? What voice might you hear if you stopped long enough to listen? What synchronicities might you notice if you approached your life as a sacred conversation rather than a series of accidents?