Coincidence Does Not Exist – Part 2:
Some time ago, while walking across the Netherlands, I wrote a blog titled Coincidence Does Not Exist!! (in Dutch) The story grew out of a series of events, each of which could easily be explained as coincidence on its own, yet together they began to form something that became increasingly difficult for me to regard as mere chance. One encounter led to the next event, an unexpected choice brought me somewhere I would otherwise never have ended up, and looking back, all kinds of separate lines suddenly seemed to connect.
Since then, my life has moved on. New lines have emerged and old ones have taken unexpected directions. And once again, I find myself returning to that same question. Only now, I look at it differently.
This time, it is not about a chance encounter along the way or a remarkable sequence of events. It is about two people who each began their own lives at different moments, thousands of kilometres apart, without the slightest idea that their lives would ever come together.
I was born in September 1972. Mimah in November 1997. Those two dates alone already tell a story.
When my life began, it would be more than twenty-five years before she was born. I could not have met her any earlier. She simply did not exist yet. While I was growing up, becoming an adult, working, loving, entering relationships, making mistakes, making choices and trying to discover what I wanted from life, hers had yet to begin.
And even once she was born, we were still nowhere near ready.
She had to be a child and grow up. Meanwhile, my life continued. She had to discover her own world, gain her own experiences and eventually become an adult. We both had to be shaped by everything that shapes a human life. By love and disappointment, by people who stay and people who disappear, by good decisions and wrong turns, by happiness, sadness, expectations and experiences whose influence you often understand only years later.
We first had to live a life before we could meet each other.
That does not mean everything that came before was merely a prelude to us. That is not how I see a human life. People who were important to us before do not become less important because someone else enters our lives later. Love does not become invalid in retrospect because a relationship ends. A period in your life does not suddenly become a mistake simply because, years later, you find yourself somewhere else.
Those lives were real too. Those loves were real too.
The people with whom I have shared my life were not stops along a route that was ultimately supposed to lead to Mimah. They had their own place in my life, and they still have that place in my life story. I have loved, I have been loved, and I have known happiness in relationships that does not need to be diminished in retrospect in order to make the love I feel today greater.
That matters even more when I look back at a love in which pain eventually arose because of choices I made myself. It would be easy, and above all unfair, to look back from where I am today and turn that relationship into part of a story in which everything apparently had to happen simply to bring me somewhere else in the end.
That is not how I want to look at another human being.
If I have to identify a mistake somewhere, it does not lie in the fact that she was in my life. Nor does it lie in the love we shared. I have to look for that mistake within myself, in my own choices and in the responsibility that comes with them.
A new love does not require rewriting an earlier love. For me, it calls for honesty about everything that genuinely existed. I do not have to make the love I felt then smaller in order to make the love I feel today greater.
That is precisely why I find it fascinating to look at time without rewriting the past.
We often speak about meeting someone as though it were a single event. You met on a particular day, through a particular route, in a particular place. That gives the encounter a starting point. Yet its true beginning lies much further back. Thousands of other moments were needed before that one encounter could happen. Decisions neither of you ever imagined would eventually have anything to do with the other person.
A choice to go somewhere. A relationship that began and had value in its own right. A relationship that ended at some point. A job you accepted. A journey you made. A message you answered. People who were present in your life briefly or for many years and left something behind. Experiences that changed you without you knowing at the time what those changes might mean later.
On both sides, there are thousands of such moments.
Change just one of them and the question arises whether those two lives would still have found each other. Of course, there is a rational answer to all of this. We live among billions of people on this earth. People meet one another constantly. Looking back, we are very good at finding patterns and giving meaning to events that seemed completely random at the time.
All of that may be true. It does not make it any less extraordinary to me.
Something can be statistically explainable and still feel almost unimaginable on a personal level. Of all the people on this earth, I happened to meet someone who was born more than twenty-five years after me, grew up thousands of kilometres away and lived a life that, for a very long time, had absolutely nothing to do with mine.
Until those two lines crossed.
Even then, it turned out that we were not yet at the point where we could truly be together.
I met Mimah about three years before our relationship began. From the beginning, there was something about her that touched me, while at the same time I kept her at a distance. I pushed her away. The age difference between us played a major role in that for me. More than twenty-five years is not simply a number I could casually set aside. Nor did I want to. Such a difference raises questions about stages of life, the future, expectations and what two people can ask of each other in the longer term.
I needed time to take those questions seriously.
Those three years were not a waiting room in which real life had yet to begin. My life continued. I lived, I loved, I was connected to other people and I carried responsibility for my own choices. It would be unfair to the people who mattered to me during that period to look back and pretend those years existed solely so that I could eventually end up with Mimah.
A human life cannot be arranged that neatly.
What was also happening during those same years was that I repeatedly kept Mimah at a distance. Not because she did not suit me, rather because I could not yet accept that someone with whom I shared such a large age difference could actually suit me so well.
Slowly, something changed.
The age difference did not change. It remained exactly the same. The questions did not suddenly disappear either. What changed was my willingness to look honestly at what truly existed between us. I did not have to make the number insignificant in order to acknowledge that the person behind that number had become important to me.
Apparently, I needed time for that.
Looking back, it taught me something that reaches beyond our relationship. Finding someone and truly allowing someone into your life can be two different events. An encounter can take place while you yourself are not yet ready to understand what that encounter means to you.
And even once two people allow each other in, love does not arise from a single moment. Then all kinds of small things begin to happen again. You keep talking, become curious and share something about yourself. The other person listens. Trust grows. You laugh together, discover similarities and learn to live with differences. Slowly, someone who was once a stranger becomes part of your life.
Somewhere along the way, something remarkable happens. Someone whose existence you once knew nothing about suddenly feels familiar.
That is what I have experienced with Mimah.
There is a song that has been part of our story for quite some time: I Found You When I Needed You Most by Bronze Music. It moves me every time, and it has also become a very special song for Mimah.
The words needed you most could easily sound as though one person needed the other to be rescued. That is not how I experience them. I had a life before Mimah. A long and full life. She had her life too. Neither of us was sitting somewhere waiting for the other to finally appear.
That, to me, is exactly where the meaning lies.
We first had to become the people who could meet each other, and apparently we then still had to become the people who could truly allow each other in.
If our lives had crossed at another moment, we would have met different versions of each other. I was not the same man twenty years ago that I am today. Mimah was not the same woman years ago that she is today. Everything we have experienced has added something to who we were when we finally stood face to face.
That is why needed you most does not mean to me that I could not live without her. It means she entered my life at a moment when I was finally able to recognise what she could mean to me. And she could recognise something in me because she, too, had travelled her own path.
There is another line in that song that touches me deeply: “Just a way to bring me home.”
During our three weeks together in Kenya, I discovered what those words mean to me.
You might think that when you travel thousands of kilometres and have only three weeks together, you would want to do something every day. Discover Kenya, go out, visit places and make the most of the limited time you have. Recently, I looked back at what we actually did. During those three weeks, we spent roughly one-third of the days out doing things.
The rest of the time, we were simply at home: together!
It was not because there was nothing to experience or because we did not feel like going anywhere. We simply discovered that we did not constantly need something to do in order to give our time together value. We did not need an itinerary to complete or a daily destination to prove that we had spent our time well. We could simply be at home together, and that alone made the day worthwhile.
Looking back, I realise how extraordinary that is.
Home, at that moment, turned out not to be a geographical location. It was neither the Netherlands nor Kenya. Home emerged wherever I no longer felt that I ought to be somewhere else.
That also helps me understand another line from the song: “I was lost until I found you.”
Was I truly lost before Mimah?
I would never describe my life that way. Everything that came before belongs to me. The loves I have known, the people who have mattered to me, my journeys, my choices, my mistakes, my happiness and my sadness do not lose their meaning simply because I later met someone else.
More than that, I want to be careful that the word lost does not diminish the people from my past. As though I spent all those years wandering aimlessly and my real life only began when Mimah appeared. That would not do justice to my life, and certainly not to the people who shared part of it with me.
I was not lost because earlier loves were wrong. I was not on my way to Mimah while other people simply happened to walk alongside me for a while. I do not want to make my history that simple or that self-centred.
Yet I now understand what those words mean to me personally.
You can live a life that genuinely has value and still discover, later on, a form of coming home that you had never known before. The new does not make the old untrue. It adds something that simply did not exist before.
Only when you arrive somewhere can the road you travelled begin to take on a different meaning. Not because that road was wrong, rather because you discover that there was another destination you never knew you were searching for.
That is what lost means to me in that song. Not lost in the sense of being helpless or directionless. It is the recognition, in hindsight, of a feeling for which I once had no destination.
And that brings me back to that old thought about coincidence.
I still believe that coincidence does not exist. In fact, everything that has happened since has only strengthened that conviction. At the same time, I do not believe our lives are predestined. To me, those are not two opposing possibilities, as though everything must either happen by chance or already be fixed in advance.
A life does not lie waiting for us to carry it out. We make choices, every single day. We choose people and distance ourselves from others. We say yes and we say no. We stay, leave, speak, remain silent, hold on and let go. We make choices we are proud of and choices that we later realise caused another person pain. Even doing nothing is ultimately a choice, with consequences that can be every bit as real. Every choice changes something about what becomes possible next. That, to me, is why coincidence does not exist.
Not every event is predetermined, yet every event arises within a reality shaped in part by everything that came before it. By our choices, by the choices of others, by circumstances beyond our control and by what we subsequently chose to do with those circumstances. One moment opens a possibility for the next, after which we once again have to decide what we will do with it.
My meeting with Mimah was not some final destination that had been waiting for me all along. We could have missed each other. Even after we found each other, we could still have lost one another. I kept her at a distance for a long time. At some point, she could have decided that enough was enough. I could have continued holding on to my conviction that an age difference of more than twenty-five years was a boundary I did not want to cross.
That did not happen. And it was not because somewhere it had been written that we would eventually be together. It happened because lives developed and because we made choices within them. Choices that created new situations in which something was asked of us again.
That is also why I do not want to look back and say that everything that came before was necessary for me to eventually end up with Mimah. Doing so would still turn my life into a predestined story and reduce people to links in a chain whose ending I now happen to think I know.
That is not how it works for me. The loves that came before were not preparation for Mimah. They were love! The people who shared my life were not stops along the way. They were people I loved and who loved me. The choices I made were real choices, and the mistakes I made had real consequences for which I carry responsibility.
I do not want to turn those years, in retrospect, into a necessary detour either. They were life. With real people, real feelings, real love, real responsibility and mistakes that were mine. All of that is allowed to exist side by side!!
That, precisely, is where the meaning of coincidence does not exist lies for me. It does not mean everything had to happen exactly as it did. It means that what we do matters. Every choice carries something into tomorrow. Every experience changes something about who we are when the next choice presents itself. A path through life takes shape as we walk it, without anyone having told us in advance where it will end.
And somewhere along that path, two lives crossed that had begun more than twenty-five years apart and had grown up thousands of kilometres away from each other.
We found each other.
After that, we still needed three years and many choices before we could truly come together.
And eventually, thousands of kilometres from the place where I was born, I found myself simply at home with Mimah. We were not searching for something we still needed to see. We were not occupied with everything we still needed to do. We were simply together, without the feeling that we ought to be anywhere else.
That was when I understood something I had never known in quite that way before.
We did not need to find each other earlier. And once we had found each other, we did not need to be immediately ready for what could grow from it. Everything that came before does not need to become smaller in order to give value to what exists now. A new love does not need to erase an earlier love in order to be real. And a mistake I made myself should never be placed on someone else simply to make my own life story fit neatly together.
None of it was a prewritten route towards each other.
They were two lives genuinely being lived, with all the freedom and responsibility that entails. Two lives in which every choice influenced what became possible next. It was not predestined, nor was it truly coincidence.
We both had to live, love, grow, lose, learn, choose and take responsibility for our own choices.
We first had to live our lives before we could come home together.
