Why We Meet the People We Meet
When we were little we used to make bets by crossing our pinkie fingers. These bets were binding, social contracts that we honored religiously (especially if they involved morning loaf in boarding school), and are one of my earliest lessons on honor and keeping my word. I’d never questioned why we used our pinkie fingers specifically to seal these agreements and make solemn promises to one another. Then I learnt that the ulnar artery connects the heart with the pinkie finger and that this is symbolic — in many cultures — of the seriousness and sincerity attached to this simple crossing.
THE RED STRING OF FATE
The Japanese originated with a myth known as The Red String of Fate. This string is said to extend from our pinkie fingers to the pinkie fingers (and by extension the hearts) of all the people that we are destined to meet. This cosmic thread may stretch when you move apart from each other, or tangle during those times when you were always in close proximity to one another yet never met, or just simply never noticed each other. But it may never break. The Chinese have a similar myth about an invisible red cord tied to the ankles of all the people we are destined to meet regardless of place, time and circumstances.
THE LITTLE SOUL
Of the multiple stories of creation that exist out there — the story of Adam and Eve, the Big Bang Theory, the Flower of Life — the story of the Little Soul is by far my most favorite. In summation, it tells of a little soul who yearns to experience herself as everything she is. She goes to God with this idea and God tells her that to experience herself as light, she must be placed in darkness.
Over a period of many lifetimes, the little soul yearns to experience herself in many different roles and situations — teacher, helper, creator, healer and forgiver — but in order to do so, other friendly souls must agree to be her student, be the ones in need of help, or the villains that need her forgiveness. So they agree to be these people for one another in each lifetime, and in this way, all get to fully experience themselves as they are.
The danger in this arrangement, is that every time souls enter a new lifetime, for the purposes of truly exercising free will and fully experiencing the new world, they must forget their previous lives and the Soul Contracts they made, but they must not forget who they really are. If they do, then other souls must then be sent to remind them of this.
This may be a story, but I’m inclined to believe in Divine Order, and the Laws of the Universe set in place to help each of us achieve our desired purpose.
SIX DEGREES OF SEPARATION
Another interesting theory about how we meet the people we meet comes from Frigyes Karinthy which proposes the idea that everyone in the world is connected to one another through six degrees of separation, that is, any two people in the world can meet each other through at most, five acquaintances. If you wanted to meet your president, or Pope Francis or anyone at all, you need only find the right five people and voila! The challenge, of course, is in knowing who the right five people are.
There are certain people we meet that seemingly have no impact in our lives, but, going by Karinthy’s theory, it could just be that we are in the chain of five acquaintances that facilitate one person’s meeting with another. These meetings and people are insignificant to us, because we are just the supporting cast in another person’s life play.
There are other people we meet who become enmeshed in our lives for a bit and then leave. These are the other little souls who are sent to teach us lessons and facilitate our journey, to remind us who we are and are not, to warn us if we are straying from the path or to urge us on if we are on the right one. Their mission is short, and as they too have their own life paths, we must allow them to leave when it is time.
As soon as we learn the lesson or get the message, circumstances force us apart. If we listen to our intuition, we can tell when people’s frequencies stop resonating with ours. Clinging on or even lingering when we are supposed to walk away only makes a mess of things. As I explained in my last post, our true nature, and the nature of life is fluidity. We must be willing to set things and people free and be open to the possibility of our paths crossing again someday, or never — for our own higher purpose.
YIN AND YANG
Then there are the people who are destined to stay in our lives throughout. Some of them are family, and others don’t necessarily have our blood coursing through their veins, but our bond is sacred. They come into our lives through kismet. Seemingly normal occurrences, like unforeseen bad weather, backed by cosmic energy and governed by the laws of the universe, tag at that red string of fate until all six degrees of separation are crossed.
They’re easy to talk to and relate to; they indulge our thoughts, whims and quirky sense of humor, and the concept of time is suspended in the force field we create together. With these souls, we made a Soul Contract to continuously learn from one another throughout our lifetimes. They are kindred souls or soul siblings and may not necessarily be romantic partners, but they are the yin to our yang.
Per the law of attraction, given that like attracts like, it is possible, not only for you to attract a person who thinks like you, likes and dislikes the same things as you, but also for your pain to be drawn to their pain, your silence be drawn to their silence and your ambition be drawn to their ambition. They’ll complement you in many ways, teaching you things you didn’t know, but sometimes they’ll act as a mirror for you to see aspects of yourself that you are not aware of.
If there are certain things about yourself that you (or other people) find frustrating, you may see it in them and find them frustrating, but in reality, they are only a reflection of yourself.
Challenging, I know! It is often difficult to discern why exactly we meet anyone, even in hindsight. It is even more difficult to fully embrace the idea that you made a Soul Contract with someone you had a tumultuous interaction with. But perhaps, like the little soul, if we try to remember and stay aware of who these people really are, it gets easier.
