Guardian Angels

"There is no such thing as chance; and what seem to us merest accident springs from the deepest source of destiny."
Friedrich Schiller

I wanted to share something that has been on my mind lately, and I hope I can find the right words to express it. It’s about making sense of suffering and an idea called synchronicity, which suggests that perhaps there are no coincidences in life, and that all of the people that come into our lives are perhaps sent to us for a specific reason.

I began thinking about this a couple of months ago when my dear friend Sam died. After I heard about this I thought a lot about the kind of life he lived and all of his fearlessness, and I began to channel his spirit and live a little more fearlessly myself. So in a sense, I had taken a tragedy, his death, and truly changed the way I was living. It was a powerful catalyst and an important discovery.

But what I want to say goes way beyond this and way beyond me. What if my friend’s death had unlocked a massive amount of doors I hadn’t even fully considered? Here is what I mean..When he died I reconnected with a bunch of old friends and also made some significant new ones. Could this have all just been coincidence or even convenience?

Perhaps. But what if it was something more? What if his death set a strange and wonderful course of events in motion that helped hundreds of other people like me reconnect? What if someone made an amazing transformation in his life as a result of reflecting on how little time we really have here? What if someone met back up with a friend who they were dying to see, which pulled them out of a terrible sense of loneliness?

All of these things are possibilities along with hundreds of others I haven’t even thought of. My point is that we all need to pay close attention to the people that come into our lives, because maybe, just maybe, they are supposed to be there. Whatever religious or spiritual beliefs you personally subscribe to, it’s become clear to me at least, that the term “things happen for a reason” is not simply a cliché’ but perhaps the secret to a greater mystical and magical understanding of how we all fit together in this world.

So for me I’ve started paying a lot closer attention to the people that come in and out of my life. I hope next time it doesn’t take something as powerful as one my oldest and greatest friends to die to make me understand this lesson.. I can’t bring him back, but what I can choose to do is honor his memory by listening to and thinking about what the universe has to tell me….I’ve come to believe that strange guardian angels exist all around us…Perhaps WE are someone’s guardian angel who can provide a laugh or a comforting word at just the right time…We never really know how we are affecting each other in this world, but it is my opinion that it is a great deal more than we perhaps give ourselves credit for.