A coin in the air—
Does it choose the side it lands on?
Or was it always decided?
The Man in the Fog
London in the mid-70s had a way of swallowing people whole. The city was a machine, all gears and moving parts, churning out moments that never quite belonged to anyone. A place where you could disappear just as easily as you could be found.
It was late, the kind of late where time lost its edges. The fog curled through the streets, wrapping itself around lamp posts and the shoulders of men walking home with their collars turned up. The rain had stopped hours ago, but the air still carried the weight of it.
I was on my way back from a bar near Soho, my thoughts tangled in the usual knots of regret and what-ifs, when I saw him. An older man, leaning against a railing by the Thames, the cigarette in his fingers burning down to its final moments. He exhaled smoke into the cold, watching the way it dissolved, as if waiting for it to form an answer he had been searching for.
He turned as I passed.
“Funny thing, fate,” he said, as if we had been speaking all along.
I paused, unsure if he was talking to me or to the river.
“You ever wonder if you were always meant to be exactly here?” he continued, tapping the railing with his free hand. “Right now, in this city, on this street, at this hour?”
His voice was steady, but there was something behind it—a kind of knowing, like he had lived this moment before.
I thought about answering. About saying something clever, something skeptical, something to keep the conversation at a distance. But instead, I just stood there, staring at the way the lights from Westminster flickered on the water, waiting for an answer I hadn’t realized I needed.
Fate, Choice, and the Space Between
Some people believe in fate the way they believe in gravity—an unshakable force pulling everything toward its intended end. Others believe life is a blank canvas, a series of choices painted onto it with nothing but free will.
But maybe it’s neither.
Maybe fate is not a pre-written story but the weight of all the choices that have already been made.
Maybe free will is not an open road but the intersections where decisions collide with circumstance.
You could turn left instead of right. Stay home instead of going out. Answer the call or let it ring.
And yet, somehow, you still end up exactly where you’re supposed to be.
Maybe not where you wanted.
Maybe not where you expected.
But always—inevitably—where you were meant to be.
Wabi-Sabi and the Beauty of Uncertainty
Wabi-sabi teaches that life is imperfect, unfinished, and fleeting. That the cracks in a plan, the deviations from a path, are not mistakes but the shape of life itself.
A river does not fight the rocks in its way—it moves around them.
A tree does not resist the wind—it bends with it.
A man does not control the universe—but he moves through it, step by step, choice by choice.
Fate is not a prison, and free will is not a guarantee.
Both are just ways of explaining the same thing: the strange, quiet miracle of being exactly here.
Lessons from a Night by the Thames
- Every decision you’ve ever made has led you here.
- Coincidence and destiny might be the same thing.
- Some moments were always waiting for you.
- Life does not ask permission before it changes.
- Whether or not you believe in fate, it still finds you.
The Cigarette, the River, the Moment That Stayed
The man flicked the last of his cigarette into the water. Watched as it disappeared, swallowed by the black current.
“Anyway,” he said, straightening his coat. “Just something to think about.”
And then he was gone, his footsteps vanishing into the fog, like he had never been there at all.
I stood there a moment longer, the cold settling into my bones, the city humming around me.
I could have left the bar a minute earlier. A minute later. Taken a different street. Never stopped to listen.
But I didn’t.
I was here.
And maybe—just maybe—I was always supposed to be.
life 
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