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Still, all the new-age self-love I can muster isn’t going to help me if I don’t put it into practice.

So I try to breathe. If I can breathe, I can find a quiet calm place from which to look out at the world, from which to gaze in at myself. And after all, I wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t supposed to be, right?

Perhaps. I find myself with a much greater faith in the universe than I used to have. It isn’t god, necessarily: just everything. If I can let go of my own little fears and my crass desires, if I release all the tight negative energy that I spend so much time caring for – what will they think, what will they do, what if I fail, how could she, how could I, what do I do next, what do I do now – just let it all go, then the universe will take care of itself. Then the universe will take care of me. There’s a plan, of some sort, I’m sure.

What we see as chaos is merely a pattern too large for our small eyes to understand. Looking out across the plain, you see a scattering of creosote bush and acacia: even the biologists call it random dispersion. But when you look closer, or when you fly overhead, you find that the shrubs hug a slight depression in the ground. Two centimeters more water per season, it is enough so that this plant lives and the other does not. Or perhaps one was nestled under a rock, just enough shade to keep the plant just cool enough so that it survived one day longer, and then it rained. It is not random; it is never random. It is just not a system we quite know how to understand.

I think it’s true on a larger scale, true in my own life. Look at the synchronicity, just often enough to keep me comforted: Driving, I look up to see the moon framed perfectly by the branches of a tree. I have just finished thinking to myself I can’t do this anymore, and the half-obscured billboard around the next turn says, “You can!” And even though the billboard is talking about my ability to buy a new car with bad credit or no credit, I am comforted. I have been thinking about how I need to buy some incense, and the next day I get some in a package from a friend. We both look up at the same time, meet eyes across the candle lit table, smile half lopsided grins, and say I think I love you in perfect, unintentional unison. It probably doesn’t mean anything at all, but it helps.

It shows me that things are happening, that things happen which are greater than me, which move around mysteriously where I can’t see them and bring elements into alignment. I am here because I am meant to be here, I am learning what I need to learn, I am doing the right thing. That there is an amazing thing to discover a belief in: that the universe has a plan for me, and I’m just following it out. The decisions are all mine, but they’re all right. It’s patently impossible for me to make the wrong choice, in the long run, because anything I choose is what needed to happen to get me wherever I eventually need to be.

Which is not to say that I don’t wear my seatbelt – this isn’t fatalism. I still have to be responsible for what I do and what I choose, still weigh the consequences and the rewards that I can see, do what I can in the context of what I know. Every decision has it’s outcome, and being human I can act in order to try and bring about the conclusion I want.

But it is a great comfort to feel as though the choice, once made, is – because it has to be – the choice I should have made. I am here, now, in this moment and place, because I am meant to be here, because I have something to learn here, or something to teach.

And maybe that means that I’m worthy of it.

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