my dear son,
YYou will meet people who will come without warning and leave fingerprints on your life that you will only notice later.
Some will last for decades.
for a few minutes.
Some will leave you scarred and lost.
Some will keep you still and move on quietly.
At that time, none of this would make sense. You call it luck or bad timing or chemistry or coincidence. I am telling you clearly now that it is neither of those things. Every person who crosses your path does so with a purpose that may not reveal itself until the crossing is over.
When you’re young, you think you’re choosing everyone you leave in your life.
You’ll believe you’re in control.
You believe attraction is choice, friendship is alignment, love is recognition.
You will believe that you have clearly seen them and made a decision.
That belief works for a while.
But it is incomplete.
Don’t meet people just because you want to. You meet them because some of you are unfinished and some of them carry a part of that work. Sometimes they bring it up gently. Sometimes they tear it. Either way, it gets the job done.
You will meet people who reflect parts of yourself that you have avoided.
You will meet people who embody courage that you have yet to claim.
You will meet people who carry wounds that you refuse to name.
You will meet people who love you in a way that scares you because it tells you to grow.
None of this is accidental.
You will later ask why that person appeared at that moment. Why not before? why not Why at all.
The answer is that you were prepared for the lesson or the lesson was prepared for you.
This does not mean that every connection is permanent. Most are not. Purpose does not guarantee permanence.
Some people come only to show you that you can’t go on.
Some come to remind you that you have forgotten what you were capable of.
Some come just for love, not to be kept.
You would be wrong to think that because something important has to be there. You will last too long. You confuse luck with obligation.
Objectives can be brief. The effect can be calming. Means duration is not required.
There will be people who will break you in ways you didn’t agree to.
They will disappoint you.
they will leave
They will betray your trust or fail you when you need stability.
You will be tempted to call this encounter wrong.
You will be tempted to be harsh.
You’ll be tempted to dismiss the whole thing as a waste of time.
It’s not wasted.
Pain is a teacher who does not explain himself while teaching. It explains itself later, if you do it.
People who hurt you will show you where your boundaries were weak or absent.
They will reveal what you were willing to put up with in exchange for being chosen.
They will make you see the value of silence.
I do not say this to excuse the loss. Loss is loss.
Whoever did it remains liable. But money doesn’t disappear because something ends badly. Often it clears up.
You learn wisdom through frustration. You learn self-respect through loss. You’ll learn to listen to your body through the moments you’ve been ignoring. These lessons don’t come gift-wrapped. They come as fractures.
Don’t romanticize pain.
It does not cling.
Don’t make it an identity.
Take what it teaches you and tread lightly. Forgiveness is not forgetting. It’s releasing the belief that the past has to hurt you to be meaningful.
Some people come to heal you by hurting you first. Not because they wanted to heal you. Because the wound forced you to change.
There will also be people who love you in ways that you may not immediately recognize. They will be patient where others are demanding. They will stay when it’s easy to leave. They can see you clearly without trying to fix you. These people will confuse you more than painful ones.
You will doubt them because the calm can feel unfamiliar.
You question their motives because you are used to earning affection.
You will test them for no money.
You will wait for the cost to manifest itself.
Some of these people teach you not through loss but through persistence.
They are meant to show you what looks like performance without performance.
They are meant to remind you that love doesn’t always come out loud.
Sometimes he comes and sits quietly next to you.
You will also lose some of these people. Not always because something went wrong.
Sometimes because time is important.
Sometimes because growth pulls you in different directions.
Sometimes it’s because one of you isn’t ready to accept another offer.
Don’t punish yourself for it. Gratitude is enough. You do not owe permanence to those who loved you. You owe honesty. You owe care. You owe it to yourself to have the courage to admit when you can’t meet them where they are.
The right people don’t complete you.
They witness you.
They don’t erase your loneliness.
They sit with it.
They don’t save you.
They will walk beside you as you learn to save yourself.
I am telling you all this so that you do not become passive or mysterious about your life. I am telling you not to waste energy fighting whatever comes.
Pay attention to who shows up when your life changes.
Pay attention to who leaves when you start making changes.
Pay attention to who is calm and still while everything else is moving.
Ask what each person is teaching you.
This is what borders needed.
What power did this awaken?
What this fear has revealed.
What tenderness this invites.
Don’t cling to the idea that destiny means comfort.
Destiny is the alignment between where you are and what you need to learn next. Sometimes that alignment is gentle. Sometimes it’s brutal.
Both are honest.
You will meet people who are understood only after a few years.
You will meet people whose absence teaches you more than their presence.
You will meet people who will always be with you even if you don’t talk anymore.
None of this is a coincidence.
And one day, much later, you’ll look back on your life line and see a pattern you didn’t see while you were inside it. You will see that nothing necessary was random. Not the timing. Not a loss. not love Not even the mistakes.
When that day comes, I hope you meet it with humility and no regrets. With gratitude rather than bitterness. With a quiet reverence for the strange intelligence that has shaped you through other people.
I am one of those people. I did not come into your life by chance. And you don’t come to me either.
That’s the last thing I want you to understand.
father
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This post was Previously published at medium.com.
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Photo credit: Ed Stone at Unsplash
