“It was supposed to happen!”
And once we get to where we’re going (and the stations along the way) one often have the feeling that it was “meant” to be just as it turned out… Perhaps there lies such a planning behind one’s life,? Or, this type of reflexion its mostly a function of our human, grandiose & creative tendency to automatically try to create wholes of fragments… Magical thinking.
I guess I’m on the brakes here. We seem to “have it in us”, wanting to see reasons behind what is happening to us. Some more than others, too, as it has been researched… I’ve referred to this study before, I know… Here is an abstract with a summary of what they found:
Farias, M., Claridge, G., & Lalljee, M. (2005). Personality and cognitive predictors of New Age practices and beliefs. Personality and Individual Differences, 39(5), 979-989.
https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2005-12590-013
What they did (free from memory) was to put people in front of a computer screen where 100 dots appeared in random combinations. They asked the test subjects to tell when they saw a motive (I think the instruction was that intended patterns could appear?) … And “newage-ers” saw significantly more of these… animals, angels, etc.
Thus, it was found that people who had certain holistic, paranatural notions of existence tended to see “meaning, order” even where there was none. How to understand that? It’s akin to superstition. Which Enlightenment, positivism, has taken out of us to some degree. It has made us more scientific and sober. On guard of ourselves. Against our human tendency to want to see connections, patterns? And to some degree we have become too skeptical & “clever” perhaps, as well… But anyway…
