Attractions Are Proportional to Destiny

What if what we call destiny were simply the name we give to what we keep unconsciously choosing?

We are used to thinking of destiny as something outside ourselves. A mysterious force, chance, coincidence, an encounter that arrives at exactly the right moment, a door that suddenly opens or closes. When something happens that we did not plan, we often say, “It was meant to be.”

But are we really sure that destiny is only what happens to us?

Perhaps there is another possibility, one that is more unsettling and, at the same time, more interesting: part of our destiny may be shaped by our own minds before we ever become conscious of our choices.

This is where a seemingly enigmatic statement begins to make sense:

“Attractions are proportional to destiny.”

This does not necessarily mean that some supernatural force leads us toward what has been written for us. It could mean something much more human: we are attracted to what is compatible with our inner structure, and by following those attractions, we gradually build our own trajectory.

Attraction Does Not Arise in a Vacuum

When we say, “I like it,” “I’m interested,” or “I’m attracted to it,” we rarely ask ourselves why.

We can meet hundreds of people and feel inexplicably drawn to just one of them. We can have dozens of possibilities in front of us and stubbornly desire only one. We can walk into a place and immediately feel at home, or experience a sense of rejection that we cannot explain.

It is as if something inside us has already made a decision before our rational mind has even begun to debate it.

Our mind does not simply observe the world: it interprets it. And in interpreting it, it selects what appears important, desirable, dangerous, or possible.

Unconscious Postulates

We can call unconscious postulates those deep assumptions through which we organize our experience without realizing it.

“Safety comes first.”

“You can’t trust people.”

“I have to prove my worth.”

“To be loved, I have to be indispensable.”

A person can live for decades according to one of these principles without ever clearly putting it into words. Yet that principle may influence the people they choose, the opportunities they recognize, and the ones they allow to pass them by.

It is a kind of invisible grammar of existence.

The process could be summarized like this:

unconscious postulate → perception → attraction or repulsion → choice → behavior → consequence.

An isolated choice does not necessarily create a destiny. But a repeated choice becomes a habit; a collection of habits creates a way of life; and a way of life can eventually begin to look remarkably like destiny.

The Unconscious Does Not Magically Create Reality

Saying that the unconscious mind “shapes reality” does not mean that our thoughts can magically materialize whatever we desire.

We do not choose the circumstances of our birth, other people's decisions, economic crises, illness, historical events, or chance.

But we can influence the way we move through those circumstances. The unconscious directs attention, shapes expectations, influences our perception of risk, and helps determine which possibilities we consider desirable—or even possible.

The point, therefore, is not that the mind creates the world, but that the mind helps construct the personal reality we derive from the world.

Attraction as a Compass

And this is where the original statement takes on a different meaning.

Attractions are proportional to destiny.

Not because we are necessarily attracted to what destiny has already determined, but because we are often attracted to what is compatible with our inner configuration.

We may unconsciously seek what confirms our worldview, satisfies a sense of lack, or allows us to repeat a familiar pattern.

And this is one of the deepest contradictions of being human: we may be attracted not to what is good for us, but to what feels familiar.

Familiarity can be mistaken for love. Anxiety for passion. Caution for wisdom. Repetition for destiny.

Attraction, therefore, is not yet destiny.

But it can be one of the paths through which destiny is built.

From Plato to Jung

The idea that attraction reveals something about us has ancient roots.

In Plato’s Symposium, eros is presented as a longing toward something perceived as beautiful, desirable, or lacking. The object of desire therefore also tells us something about the person who desires it. We do not simply desire a person or a thing: we desire what that person or thing represents to us.

With Jung, this insight enters the territory of the unconscious. Our fascinations, projections, and attractions may be connected to psychological contents of which we are not fully aware. Even synchronicity, in his perspective, illustrates how an event can acquire particular meaning when it encounters a structure of meanings already present within us.

There is no need to assume that the universe is sending us a message. It is enough to recognize that we are not neutral observers of reality: we assign meaning to it through what we are.

Character Is Destiny

At this point, we can better understand the ancient intuition attributed to Heraclitus:

“Character is destiny.”

Character is our habitual way of being in the world. The cautious person sees dangers that the bold person does not. The insecure person looks for reassurance that the self-confident person does not consider necessary. The distrustful person interprets as a threat what someone else sees as ordinary. The ambitious person sees an opportunity where someone else sees only hard work.

Character thus becomes a filter through which we select reality.

It does not determine everything that happens to us, but it helps determine how we encounter what happens to us and which possibilities we are able to recognize.

Perhaps We Call Destiny What We Have Repeated

Here the argument becomes truly uncomfortable.

Perhaps some people have not simply had “bad luck.” Perhaps they have unconsciously repeated the same patterns: choosing similar people, avoiding the same opportunities, reacting in the same way to the same problems.

After twenty years, they look back and say:

“It was destiny.”

But perhaps it was repetition.

This does not mean that everything is under our control. Life contains chance, injustice, and circumstances we cannot control. It does mean, however, that we must consider another possibility: part of destiny is not written before us, but emerges from the choices we repeatedly make.

Freedom Begins When We See What Guides Us

If this is true, freedom is not simply the abstract ability to choose. It is the ability to recognize where our choices come from.

As long as we cannot see our unconscious postulates, we may mistake them for truth. As long as we do not recognize our patterns, we may call them character. As long as we do not understand our attractions, we may call them destiny.

The question then changes.

It is no longer simply:

“What do I want?”

It becomes:

“Why do I want this particular thing?”

And then:

“Which part of me is doing the wanting?”

And finally:

“If I changed the unconscious postulate guiding this choice, would I still want the same thing?”

Perhaps this is the true frontier of inner freedom: not always doing what we want, but understanding who it is that wants.

What If We Are Destiny?

Perhaps the most uncomfortable question is not whether destiny exists, but how much of what we call destiny has been built, day after day, by ourselves without our realizing it.

We may have spent years saying, “That’s just how it turned out,” “It wasn’t my path,” or “I wasn’t lucky.” And perhaps, to some extent, that is true. Life contains chance, injustice, and circumstances beyond our control.

But there is another possibility: that part of our lives is the consequence of what we kept choosing without knowing why we were choosing it.

Perhaps we called a fear that became a habit destiny. A wound we never understood, character. The fear of taking risks, prudence. Perhaps we mistook for love whatever confirmed an unconscious need within us.

At this point, “character is destiny” stops being merely a philosophical formula and becomes a responsibility.

Because if our character shapes what we see, what we desire, and what we choose, then changing our destiny may first require becoming conscious of what moves us.

The final question, therefore, is no longer:

“What is my destiny?”

But:

“How much of what I call destiny is the result of unconscious postulates I have never questioned?”

Perhaps we are not merely people to whom life happens.

Perhaps we are also the people who, without realizing it, keep choosing the same life.

And this is where the opening statement takes on its most unsettling meaning:

attractions are proportional to destiny not because destiny leads us toward what we desire, but because what we desire may lead us toward the destiny we will eventually call our own.

Serendipity, Antifragility, and Destiny: The Art of Living with Uncertainty

The Three Princes of Serendip

For centuries, human beings have nurtured a comforting yet ultimately misleading belief: that the course of life can be planned, managed, and controlled. We study to earn qualifications, work to build successful careers, save money to secure the future, and carefully organize each stage of our lives as though existence were a project that could be engineered with sufficient foresight.

This mindset has undoubtedly fueled remarkable scientific, technological, and economic achievements. Yet it has also encouraged a dangerous illusion—the belief that the future is fundamentally predictable.

Reality tells a different story.

The greatest scientific discoveries, technological revolutions, professional breakthroughs, and even the relationships that shape our lives frequently emerge from events that no one anticipated. Careers change because of unexpected encounters. New ideas arise from failures. Entire lives are redirected by accidents, crises, or seemingly insignificant decisions whose importance becomes clear only years later.

This is the realm of serendipity.

The word was coined in the eighteenth century by the English writer Horace Walpole, who drew inspiration from the Persian tale The Three Princes of Serendip. The princes repeatedly made remarkable discoveries not because they were unusually fortunate, but because they possessed exceptional powers of observation. They noticed details that others ignored and connected seemingly unrelated clues into meaningful insights.

Serendipity, therefore, is often misunderstood.

It is not simply luck.

Luck distributes random events indiscriminately.

Serendipity is what happens when a prepared mind recognizes the hidden value of those events.

Louis Pasteur captured this idea perfectly when he famously observed that "chance favors the prepared mind."

Chance presents opportunities.

Preparation determines who is capable of recognizing them.

This distinction is far more profound than it may first appear.

Every day countless people encounter similar opportunities. Most pass unnoticed. A few become turning points that reshape entire lives.

When Alexander Fleming noticed that mold had contaminated one of his bacterial cultures, he could easily have discarded it as a laboratory mistake. Instead, curiosity led him to ask why bacteria failed to grow around the mold. That question eventually opened the way to the discovery of penicillin.

Similarly, engineer Percy Spencer was not attempting to invent the microwave oven when he observed that a chocolate bar had melted while he was working near a magnetron. What might have seemed an insignificant accident became the foundation of an entirely new technology.

Spencer Silver experienced something similar when he developed an adhesive that appeared too weak to be commercially useful. Years later, that apparent failure became the basis for one of the world's most recognizable office products: the Post-it Note.

History repeatedly demonstrates the same lesson.

Progress rarely follows a straight line.

Unexpected discoveries are not exceptions to human advancement.

They are often its driving force.

This insight extends well beyond science.

Professional life follows the same pattern.

Many careers that now appear coherent and carefully planned were, in reality, shaped by unexpected detours: temporary positions that became permanent, unsuccessful projects that revealed new opportunities, economic crises that forced reinvention, or chance encounters that transformed professional trajectories.

Looking backward, everything appears logical.

Living through those moments, however, almost nothing feels predictable.

This tendency to reconstruct the past as though it had always made sense was explored extensively by psychologist Daniel Kahneman. Human beings naturally create coherent narratives that explain previous events, convincing themselves that outcomes were foreseeable all along. In reality, those same events were often characterized by profound uncertainty while they unfolded.

Steve Jobs expressed this idea with remarkable clarity during his famous commencement address at Stanford University in 2005.

"You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards."

Perhaps no modern sentence captures the essence of serendipity more effectively.

Yet this observation raises a deeper question.

If uncertainty is unavoidable, how should we live?

Should we simply surrender ourselves to chance?

Or is there a way to transform uncertainty from a threat into an advantage?

It is precisely here that another powerful concept enters the conversation—antifragility.

Antifragility and the Wisdom of Uncertainty

The question of how human beings should respond to uncertainty has occupied philosophers for more than two thousand years. Long before modern economics, psychology, or complexity science attempted to understand risk, ancient thinkers had already recognized that unpredictability is not an exception to life—it is its defining condition.

Perhaps no philosopher expressed this more succinctly than Heraclitus.

His famous observation, panta rhei—"everything flows"—remains one of the most profound descriptions of reality ever formulated. Nothing remains fixed. Every individual, every institution, every civilization exists within an endless process of transformation. Stability, from this perspective, is never permanent; it is only a temporary balance within continuous change.

The desire for absolute certainty therefore places us in conflict with the very nature of existence.

Centuries later, the Stoic philosophers reached a remarkably similar conclusion.

Seneca and Epictetus argued that genuine freedom begins when we distinguish between what lies within our control and what does not. External events belong largely to fortune. Our judgments, choices, and responses remain our own responsibility.

This insight continues to resonate because it shifts attention away from prediction and toward character.

The future cannot be mastered.

Our response to it can.

Friedrich Nietzsche carried this idea even further through his concept of amor fati—the love of one's fate. Rather than merely accepting whatever happens, Nietzsche challenged us to embrace every event, including hardship and failure, as an indispensable part of who we become.

Misfortune is not simply something to endure.

It can become something that shapes us.

Modern psychology echoes this perspective in unexpected ways. Viktor Frankl, reflecting on his experiences in Nazi concentration camps, concluded that human beings can survive extraordinary suffering when they are able to discover meaning within it. Circumstances alone do not determine our lives; interpretation does.

A crisis is never automatically an opportunity.

It becomes one only if we are capable of transforming it into growth.

This philosophical tradition finds a striking contemporary expression in the work of Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

In The Black Swan, Taleb argues that history is shaped less by predictable trends than by rare, unexpected events whose consequences are enormous. Financial collapses, technological revolutions, pandemics, political upheavals, and scientific breakthroughs all share a common characteristic: before they occurred, almost nobody expected them.

Human beings nevertheless possess a remarkable tendency to rewrite history afterward, convincing themselves that such events had always been obvious.

This illusion of predictability is one of our greatest cognitive weaknesses.

Taleb's response, however, is not pessimism.

Instead, he asks a more practical question.

If uncertainty is inevitable, how should individuals, organizations, and societies prepare for it?

His answer appears in Antifragile, where he introduces one of the most original concepts in contemporary philosophy.

Taleb distinguishes between three different conditions.

The fragile is damaged by volatility.

The robust resists volatility without changing.

The antifragile improves because of volatility.

This distinction fundamentally changes the way we think about success.

For centuries, resilience has been considered the ideal. We admire people and institutions that survive adversity without collapsing.

Taleb argues that survival alone is not enough.

The most successful systems are those that learn, adapt, and emerge stronger precisely because they have been exposed to stress, randomness, and disorder.

Nature offers countless examples.

Human muscles become stronger through physical stress.

The immune system develops through exposure to pathogens.

Evolution itself progresses through variation, selection, and countless failures.

Order often emerges from instability rather than despite it.

Professional life follows the same principle.

A career built upon a single skill, a single employer, or a single economic environment may appear secure, yet it is often surprisingly fragile. One unexpected technological change, one recession, or one organizational restructuring may be enough to undermine years of apparent stability.

By contrast, individuals who continuously learn, cultivate diverse relationships, acquire complementary skills, and remain intellectually curious gradually build something far more valuable than certainty.

They build optionality.

Optionality—the existence of multiple possible paths forward—is one of Taleb's central ideas. The more options we possess, the greater our ability to benefit from unexpected events instead of becoming their victims.

This is precisely where antifragility meets serendipity.

Serendipity creates the unexpected opportunity.

Antifragility enables us to recognize it, adapt to it, and ultimately transform it into lasting value.

Together, these ideas suggest a radically different philosophy of success.

Rather than attempting to eliminate uncertainty, we should cultivate the qualities that allow uncertainty to work in our favor.

Curiosity.

Humility.

Continuous learning.

Adaptability.

The courage to revise our assumptions.

In an unpredictable world, these may prove more valuable than certainty itself.

Chance, Freedom, and the Making of Destiny

If serendipity teaches us how to recognize opportunity, and antifragility teaches us how to grow through uncertainty, a deeper philosophical question still remains.

What, ultimately, is the relationship between chance and destiny?

For centuries, Western thought has oscillated between two opposing visions. On one side lies determinism—the belief that every event is governed by an unbreakable chain of causes. On the other stands the conviction that human beings possess genuine freedom and therefore participate in shaping their own future.

Modern science has done little to settle this debate.

Instead, it has made reality appear even more complex.

The philosopher Karl Popper argued that scientific knowledge advances not through certainty but through error. Every theory remains provisional, constantly exposed to criticism and revision. Progress is therefore not the accumulation of unquestionable truths but an endless process of correction.

Ignorance, paradoxically, is not the enemy of knowledge.

It is its starting point.

This insight extends beyond science.

Every important decision in life is made with incomplete information.

We choose careers without knowing how industries will evolve.

We form relationships without knowing where they will lead.

We make investments without certainty.

We raise children without guarantees.

The future is always partially hidden.

Herbert Simon, one of the founders of modern decision theory, described this condition through the concept of bounded rationality. Human beings never possess unlimited knowledge, unlimited time, or unlimited cognitive capacity. Rather than optimizing every decision, we usually settle for solutions that are sufficiently good under conditions of uncertainty.

Perfection is rarely available.

Adaptation is.

James G. March expanded this idea by distinguishing between exploitation and exploration.

Exploitation means refining what we already know.

Exploration means searching for what we do not yet know.

Successful individuals, organizations, and even civilizations depend on maintaining a dynamic balance between these two forces. Too much exploitation leads to rigidity. Too much exploration leads to instability.

Wisdom lies in knowing when to preserve and when to change.

Edgar Morin reached a similar conclusion through his philosophy of complexity. Reality cannot be reduced to simple chains of cause and effect because every phenomenon emerges from countless interactions operating simultaneously. Complexity is not disorder waiting to be simplified; it is the normal condition of the world.

The Nobel Prize-winning chemist Ilya Prigogine arrived at an analogous insight from an entirely different discipline. His theory of dissipative structures demonstrated that systems far from equilibrium often generate new forms of order precisely because they experience instability.

Chaos, under the right conditions, becomes creative.

Order does not always precede change.

Sometimes it is born from it.

Seen from this perspective, uncertainty ceases to be merely a source of anxiety.

It becomes the very space within which innovation, freedom, and personal development become possible.

This realization also changes the meaning of destiny.

Destiny is often imagined as a predetermined script, a future that exists independently of our choices. Yet another interpretation is possible.

Perhaps destiny is not something waiting to be discovered.

Perhaps it is something continuously created.

Chance presents possibilities.

Freedom transforms possibilities into decisions.

Time turns those decisions into a life.

In this sense, chance and freedom are not opposites.

They are partners.

Chance opens doors.

Freedom decides which ones we walk through.

Looking backward, those choices gradually form the coherent narrative we call a life.

Looking forward, however, they remain profoundly uncertain.

This is why Steve Jobs' famous observation continues to resonate so deeply:

"You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards."

The dots are not connected because the future is predetermined.

They become connected because human beings constantly create meaning from experience.

Psychologist Daniel Kahneman demonstrated how naturally we construct narratives that make the past appear more predictable than it truly was. Our minds seek coherence even where history was filled with ambiguity.

Yet this tendency also reveals something beautiful.

Human life is not merely a sequence of events.

It is a continuous act of interpretation.

Every setback may become a lesson.

Every unexpected encounter may become a turning point.

Every apparent failure may become the foundation of future success.

Not because fate demanded it.

But because we chose to assign it meaning.

Ultimately, serendipity, antifragility, and philosophy converge toward the same conclusion.

The goal of life is not to eliminate uncertainty.

Such a goal is impossible.

Nor is it to surrender passively to randomness.

Instead, wisdom consists in cultivating the qualities that allow uncertainty to become fertile.

To remain intellectually curious.

To continue learning.

To welcome change without losing one's principles.

To develop the courage to revise long-held assumptions.

To recognize opportunity where others see only disruption.

The future does not belong to those who believe they can predict everything.

It belongs to those who remain prepared for what no one can predict.

Serendipity teaches us to notice what others overlook.

Antifragility teaches us to grow through what others fear.

Philosophy teaches us to understand why both are essential to a meaningful life.

Perhaps this is the deepest lesson uncertainty has to offer.

Life is not a straight road leading toward a destination already marked on the map.

It is a journey whose direction emerges gradually, shaped by the encounter between chance, freedom, and responsibility.

We cannot choose every event that enters our lives.

But we can choose, every single day, what kind of person we become because of them.

And perhaps that is the closest thing we have to destiny.

The Little Bird on the Terrace and the Things Beyond Our Control

Years ago, I found a small wild bird on the terrace of my home. It could no longer fly; it seemed either injured or simply too weak to continue its journey. My family and I tried to help it: we gave it water and food, and we took care of it, hoping that it would regain its strength and return to freedom.

But the next day, we found it dead.

That simple episode has remained with me as a small but profound lesson about life. There are situations, people, projects, and paths in which we can invest all our commitment, our goodwill, and our energy, yet despite everything we do, the final outcome does not entirely depend on us.

We can try to save a little bird, but we cannot always give it back its life. We can try to help a person, but we cannot always change their destiny. We can build a project with passion and dedication, but we cannot force the world to embrace it.

Life constantly places us before this limit: the distance between what depends on our will and what belongs instead to forces greater than ourselves.

Accepting this does not mean giving up or becoming indifferent. On the contrary, it means recognizing the value of the attempt itself. The meaning of our actions is not determined only by the final result, because there is also value in the journey, in the effort, and in the inner transformation that every experience creates.

I often think about this reflection also in relation to this blog.

I have devoted time, study, and passion to writing these articles. I have tried to explore profound questions: the meaning of life and death, contemporary society, history, politics, religion, anthropology, and the nature of human beings. Every article has been a journey of research and discovery for me.

Of course, the success of a blog does not depend only on the person who writes it. It also depends on the historical moment in which an idea emerges, on algorithms, on people's attention, on the dynamics of contemporary communication, and on circumstances that are completely beyond an author's control.

I can only do my part: write with honesty, investigate, share ideas, and leave a trace.

The rest will follow its own course.

If this blog reaches many readers, I will be happy. If some ideas manage to reach distant minds and inspire reflection, it will be a great satisfaction. But even if the final result is different from my expectations, I would not consider this journey a failure.

Because the true value of an experience is not measured only by external recognition, but also by what it leaves within us.

This blog, before being an attempt to communicate with others, has been an exercise in knowledge and awareness. It has forced me to ask questions, to challenge my own beliefs, and to look at the world through different eyes.

Perhaps the little bird on the terrace taught me exactly this: we cannot always change the destiny of things, but we can choose the attitude with which we face them.

We can do what is within our possibilities, offer our contribution, and take care of what we encounter along the way. Then we must accept that reality will follow its own course.

And in this acceptance — which is not resignation, but maturity — perhaps lies one of the deepest forms of human freedom.

Sleep and Have Luck

My father often used to say a phrase that, when I was young, sounded almost like a provocation: “Sleep and have luck.”

As the years passed, however, my experiences, the books I have read, and above all the many human stories I have encountered led me to recognize that behind that simple saying there was a profound truth.

Hard work, education, talent, and perseverance are certainly important elements, but they do not always fully explain the destiny of individuals. Life contains a silent and unpredictable factor, one that is often ignored in the stories of success: luck.

We only need to observe many unexpected careers, many social rises that began in poor neighborhoods, and many transformations of ordinary people into successful entrepreneurs, influential figures, or public personalities. Behind some of these stories there are certainly ability and sacrifice, but there is often something else as well: a chance encounter with the right person at the right moment; an opportunity that appears unexpectedly; someone else’s mistake that opens a door; a favorable circumstance that completely changes the course of a life.

Yet society often tends to describe success as if it were always the exclusive result of individual merit. It is a comforting narrative because it suggests that those who reach the top did so only because they worked harder than everyone else. Reality, however, is usually far more complex. Two people with similar abilities can experience completely different destinies simply because fortune placed them in different circumstances.

Even the biblical tradition does not seem to deny this mysterious dimension of human existence. In Psalm 127, we read:

"Unless the Lord builds the house,

the builders labor in vain.

Unless the Lord watches over the city,

the guards stand watch in vain.

In vain you rise early

and stay up late,

toiling for food to eat—

for He grants sleep to those He loves."

The meaning of the Psalm is not an invitation to laziness. It does not say that human beings should abandon effort or responsibility. Rather, it expresses something deeper: human effort alone cannot explain everything. There is a dimension beyond our control, called by faith grace, by philosophy chance, and by everyday language simply luck.

Perhaps my father, with a simple phrase, had understood a truth that economists, sociologists, and psychologists have later examined: human beings create their own opportunities, but they do not completely control the circumstances in which those opportunities become reality.

Therefore, “sleep and have luck” is not a celebration of passivity. It is a lesson in humility. It reminds those who reach great heights not to attribute everything to themselves, and it reminds those who remain behind that failure is not always the result of personal inadequacy.

Because in life we certainly need our hands to build, but sometimes we also need something that does not depend on our hands.

Perhaps this is why the wisdom of an old popular saying still survives: we must work, prepare ourselves, and strive — but we must also recognize that every human journey contains an unpredictable element.

The builders need their tools.

But sometimes, they also need a favorable wind.

The Door I Never Knocked On

I was tempted to knock.

I'm not the kind of person who gets invited in. I don't have the right surname, nor have I ever excelled at anything that couldn't easily be dismissed as noise or vanity. The circumstances of my birth were such that very few would have bet on me ending up where I am today.

Everything seemed to conspire toward my failure: the family I was born into, the human outskirts in which I grew up, a personality that was reserved in some ways and excessive in others. The rest was my own doing. I was never truly a friend to anyone—not even to myself whenever I mistook wishful thinking for genuine goals.

Realistic goals become visible only when the center of the compass is steady. Only then do we know the widest arc we can draw with the pencil at its other end. Without that fixed center, every project risks becoming little more than fantasy.

Yet I kept moving forward without a square, without an apron, without a trowel, and without a plumb line. I moved instinctively, like a river finding its course wherever gravity allowed the water to flow, never really knowing where it would eventually lead.

That is why I thought about knocking on a certain door.

Only later did I understand that the most important work is always an individual one. In the corridors of life, we speak far more to ourselves than to anyone else. We ask questions of ourselves far more often than we ask them of others, trying to make the best use of the cards that fate has placed in our hands.

Shortcuts? Networks? Preferential treatment? Memberships? Recommendations?

Perhaps all of that would have made sense if I could go back twenty-five years. Even then, I suspect I would eventually have discovered that what we call synchronicity is often nothing more than chance, and that our fortunate moment may arrive regardless of the lodge, the association, or the committee we happen to belong to.

And besides, what does it really mean to reach the top?

Far better to pursue clear, attainable goals from the place where we actually stand, knowing that every destination reached simply becomes the starting point for the next journey.

Esotericism has never truly interested me. To my eyes, it is often just a more refined and elegant way of building symbolic systems that, all too easily, drift away from reality—much like ideologies and religions do whenever they stop inviting people to question themselves and begin asking only for belief.

There has always been only one smorfia—my own.

Everything else is just noise.