One of my favourite moments in my Fringe show was a silly gag.
At one point, I pretended to use mayonnaise as sunscreen. I’d scoop out a generous amount, spread it all over my hands, and the audience would laugh at the ridiculousness of it.
It was one of those moments that looked completely harmless.
What I didn’t realize was that it was quietly sabotaging the rest of my show.
Later in the performance, I perform several bubble tricks that rely on bubbles sticking gently to my hands. During rehearsals at home, they worked beautifully. On stage, however, they kept failing. The bubbles wouldn’t stick. They would pop unexpectedly.
Show after show, I wondered what I was doing differently.
Was I nervous?
Was it the theatre lights?
The humidity?
The audience?
Then it finally dawned on me.
The mayonnaise. More specifically, the oil in the mayonnaise.
Without realizing it, one small comedy gag at the beginning of the show had been affecting something completely unrelated fifteen minutes later.
The mystery was solved.
But it also got me thinking.
How often does life work exactly the same way?
We spend so much time looking for obvious explanations. We assume every outcome has a direct and visible cause. Yet some of the biggest influences on our lives happen quietly, hidden beneath the surface, only revealing themselves years later.
I’ve wondered about this many times.
If my marriage had unfolded differently, would I have burned out? Or would I have found my spiritual side?
If I hadn’t burned out, would I have ever left my career in IT?
If I had stayed in IT, would I have travelled for two years?
Would I have discovered bubbles?
Would I have written a Fringe play?
Would I be writing this blog today?
The honest answer is…
I don’t know.
And I never will.
Life isn’t a straight line.
It’s a web of tiny moments, decisions, accidents, conversations, disappointments, and opportunities that quietly shape one another in ways we rarely understand while we’re living them.
We often look back and think one event changed everything.
But perhaps it wasn’t one event at all.
Perhaps it was dozens of small moments, each nudging the next, until eventually our lives headed in a completely different direction. That’s both unsettling and comforting. Unsettling because we realize how little control we truly have. Comforting because it reminds us that even the smallest moments matter.
A conversation.
A wrong turn.
A chance meeting.
A decision to say yes.
Or even…
A handful of mayonnaise.
None of us can predict which moments will quietly alter the course of our lives.
All we can do is live them. Trust them.
And years later, smile when we finally discover the invisible thread that connected them all.
Maybe that’s one of life’s greatest mysteries.
The most important moments often don’t feel important until long after they’ve happened.