I watched Hope recently, and while the movie itself is quite a ride, one idea stayed with me long after it ended.
The idea that fate is the evidence of what we do not see.
I don’t know if I can explain exactly why that thought resonated with me so much. Maybe because, when I look back at my own life, there are so many moments that seemed random when they happened but make a strange kind of sense when I look at where they eventually led me.
I’ve never been someone who believes everything happens for a reason in a simplistic way. Life can be painful. Things happen that we would never choose. People leave. Relationships change. Opportunities disappear. Sometimes things simply don’t work out.
But I do believe there are things happening around us that we cannot see yet.
A door closes, and we have no idea what it is making room for.
A plan falls apart, and we don’t know what path it is forcing us to take.
We meet someone unexpectedly who changes something inside us.
We make a decision that seems insignificant at the time, only to discover years later that it changed the direction of our lives.
How could we possibly see the meaning of those moments while we’re living them? We can’t.
Maybe that’s where I think fate comes in.
When I look at where I am today, I can trace a path backward through decisions, mistakes, relationships, losses, opportunities and unexpected turns. At the time, many of them didn’t look like pieces of a bigger picture. They were simply things happening to me.
But somehow, they brought me here.
To this version of my life.
To the things I create now. To the people I’ve met. To the experiences I’ve had. To the questions I’m asking. To a life that looks very different from the one I once thought I was supposed to live.
And I can’t help wondering how much of it I could have predicted.
Almost none of it.
That’s what makes fate so fascinating to me.
Maybe fate isn’t some predetermined script where every event has already been written. Maybe it’s simply the name we give to the pattern we can see after enough of our life has happened.
We can’t see the whole picture while we’re standing inside it. We only see the pieces. And sometimes a piece that looks completely meaningless turns out to be essential.
I’ve had moments in my life when I thought something was an ending, only to discover later that it was a beginning I couldn’t recognize yet.
I’ve had things I desperately wanted not work out, only to eventually realize that if they had, I might never have arrived at the life I have now.
That’s why I believe in fate not because I think everything is predetermined, but because I believe there is so much about our lives that we simply cannot see.
There are connections we haven’t made yet.
People we haven’t met.
Experiences we haven’t had.
Versions of ourselves we haven’t become.
And perhaps that is why we should be careful about deciding too quickly that something happening today is good or bad, right or wrong, success or failure.
We don’t know the ending. We’re judging a single page of a book we haven’t finished reading.
Maybe that’s what faith and fate have in common.
Both require us to believe in something we do not yet see.
And when I look at my own life, I have enough evidence behind me now to trust that what I cannot see today may eventually make sense.
So I don’t need to know exactly where my life is going.
I just need to keep moving.
Stay open.
Pay attention.
Say yes when something feels right.
Let go when something no longer fits.
And trust that the road doesn’t have to make perfect sense while I’m walking it. Because maybe fate isn’t something waiting for us at the end of the road.
Maybe fate is the invisible thread connecting all the things we couldn’t understand while they were happening.
And perhaps one day, when I look back at this moment too, I’ll realize that even this was taking me somewhere I couldn’t yet see.
“In a recent dream, the Emperor came to me. He said faith is evidence
of what we do not see. What I am seeing now is not evidence.” – Hope (2026)