Lightning or Magnets?

It’s been a while since I sat down and wrote much of anything worth while or worth reading. Mostly just cataloging what’s been happening to me, and while it absorbs most of my energy to think about these things, they are neither new nor unique in the spectrum of human emotion. And while I’m not entirely certain that anything I put on this page, or the page after, or the many pages that will most likely follow will break the pattern of my own literary monotony, I’m in the mood to write something with a little more depth than a description of Austrian food or the ins and outs of not speaking the language in the country you’re currently living in. I think what I would rather talk about are those sudden and electric connections we feel with the right people at the right time.

I’m not entirely certain where I stand on the big questions like God and the afterlife, and while I certainly believe there is something larger and greater than ourselves, I don’t think for the life of me I could describe it, much less name it. If I tried, I think it would be one of those things where everyone reading it would say, “Yes, that’s what I believe too!” and then insist that I am Christian, or Buddhist, or Hindu, or Jewish, or Panthesist, or Agnostic or any other religious affiliation I might run into, and I just haven’t realized it until now. And quite frankly, I think I would disagree with all of them on the principle that if I have no desire to name (and thus pigeon hole – the act of description is by its very nature exclusive more than inclusive­) my mostly unformed beliefs, I would prefer it if they respected that and left well enough alone. After all, I don’t listen to a Hindu describe his beliefs and insist he’s actually Jewish or what have you. But in addition to a vague belief that the greatest good and greatest evil really stem from our inherent humanity rather than a big white bearded man or something below the surface of the earth with too many arms, I do believe there are things in this life that are supposed to happen to us, and most usually other people are the instruments through which those things happen.

From my own life, just in the last fourish years, I have a quick string of examples. My freshman year I went to Gonzaga University where I was bullied by a small little girl who was enabled by a handful of people too scared to stop her (myself included, sadly), and if that hadn’t happened I wouldn’t have wanted to transfer schools, which led me to DU. If I hadn’t been at DU, I wouldn’t have taken a Russian class which inevitably led me to two of my best friends who have taught me that I am interesting and charming, sometimes despite my own best efforts, not to mention the other myriad of fascinating people I spent two years studying with. I also wouldn’t have met Alexa, who in addition to being another of my best friends, has taught me that we get to choose the way we look at life and that makes all the difference. I also wouldn’t have ended up living with four strangers, two of whom became my Ambiguously Gay Duo, who have taught me to occasionally pull the stick out of my own ass and have fun. If I hadn’t been living in that neighborhood, I wouldn’t have found an extra family in the Brainerds, especially Claire. And most importantly (in this moment, at least) I wouldn’t have ended up in Prague, where I have flourished. In the short time I’ve been here, I’ve learned not to dig my feet in over things I haven’t given a chance yet, I’ve learned to let people in more easily, and most importantly I’ve learned to stop hating myself and rather to love the person I am and the person I have the capacity to become. And I could certainly pinpoint those changes on a particular person, the same way I’ve attributed growth to Robert, Tyler, Alexa, Garret, and Alex, but I think to do so would make him blush. But this leads me to what I actually wanted to talk about.

Do you ever wonder if the people in this life that end up being most important to us are coincidences? Or do you think that certain souls will pull at each other over time and space the same way strong enough magnets pull at each other no matter what you put between them? The pragmatist in me wants to say it’s the first one – of all the millions of people on this earth, and the thousands you meet in only a year, much less your whole life, its statistically inevitable that you will find a handful of people who will have irreversible effects on you, for good and for ill. But the romanticist in me just cannot accept that. I just can’t, especially given what’s happened – who’s happened – to me in Prague. And what about those people who change you irreversibly and then slip out of your life forever? Less like magnets and more like lightning, but even that’s a bad metaphor because lightning is random and how can something like being bullied into a happier life be random? How can a connection so intense and instantaneous that you felt it after an hour – an hour!–  be random? There are people in my life who have had such a steadfast influence in my life, it’s easy to say they aren’t random presences – my mother, for one; Lizzy, for another. There are newer people - Robert, Tyler, Alexa, Garret, Alex, just to use pre-established examples – who came into my life slowly enough that I can still probably assert they weren’t random either. But even with these two groups – new and old – I will accept arguments that they are random. They are, truthfully, the fruits of a seemingly random string of events. Any change in my mother’s life, and who’s to say I would have been born to her, or born at all. I wouldn’t have met Lizzy if we hadn’t been grocery shopping in the wrong store, and I still don’t know why we were there instead of our local grocery chain. I’ve already gone over the weird singularity that brought me to meet the five above, which never would have happened if I’d had the stones to stand up to a small school bully, or if someone else had called her on her bullshit. But this Prague thing… logically, it has to be random. There are whole different continents I could be studying on, and even on this continent there are thousands of cities I could be in instead, and then in this city there are other schools and programs I could have chosen. And that’s just on my side, just think about all the thousand different choices the particular person I’m talking about could have made that would have changed where and who he is now. It certainly wouldn’t be fair to think of him as a static entity when I’m not one myself. This whole thing has to be the cosmic result of a million little things randomly lining up. But… no. How do you statistically explain away any of this: I never considered anywhere but Europe, and I was going to go to Glasgow but at the last minute I had an overwhelming conviction that I belonged in Prague. How do you explain away that if he had literally any other job than the one he does, we would have never met, and it wasn’t even a job he initially wanted. How do you explain two people having an hour long conversation and getting the other so stuck in their heads that the next time they spoke it was almost electric? How can any of that be random?

I don’t know. I just do not know. I want to say it’s random, and I’m not sure why, but I just cannot bring myself to do that. Honestly, I can’t stop wondering if the reality of the whole thing is that I cannot possibly comprehend the way two souls can end up on a collision course, and just like no one knew what would happen at the Large Hadron Collider but it didn’t stop them from trying, I have no idea how this particular reaction is going to end either. But at no point in this whole thing have I ever been scared of imploding into a black hole, and if you know me, you know I am terrified of that exact thing happening almost constantly.

The last thing I would end this incredibly personal rant on how little I understand anything on is a quote by Elizabeth Gilbert, which I love even though she’s responsible for the estrogen filled zit that is Eat, Pray, Love. “A true soul mate is probably the most important person you’ll ever meet, because they tear down your walls and smack you awake… Soul mates, they come into your life just to reveal another layer of yourself to you, and then leave. A soul mate’s purpose is to shake you up, tear apart your ego a little bit, show you your obstacles and addictions, break your heart open so new light can get in, and make you so desperate and out of control that you have to transform your life.”