Fortuity
“Chance and chance alone has a message for us. Everything that occurs out of necessity, everything expected, repeated day in and day out, is mute. If a love is to be unforgettable, fortuities must immediately start fluttering down to it like birds to Francis of Assisi’s shoulders.
Our day-to-day life is bombarded with fortuities or to be more precise, with the accidental meetings of people and events we call coincidences. We do not even notice the great majority of such coincidences.Guided by his sense of beauty, an individual transforms a fortuitous occurrence into a motif, which then assumes a permanent place in the composition of the individual’s life. …… but it is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in his daily life. For he thereby deprives his life of a dimension of beauty.”
~ Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
These words kind of stood with me. Is it indeed true as Milan Kundera says, that what our lives are, are a result of what fortuities we notice and what we let go by? Is it as simplistic as that and is destiny just an aggregate of all the coincidences that we act upon? Or is it more a pre-defined one and what fortuities we notice was actually pre-defined as part of the destiny package? I guess that is a function of what our belief system is.
I have always been fascinated by the concept of the ‘unknown alternative’ and do believe that for most situations in our life, there is an alternative that was finally not taken. There have been any number of situations where my mind goes ‘hmm….this is where I am today…where would I have been had I taken that option?’. I have written about the movie Sliding Doors before. Though the movie was not really a classic, I found the concept interesting when I saw it a few years back. They make it a ‘known alternative’ and take both stories forward.
Of course this is not a simple topic to write, think or talk about. But sometimes there can be the right triggers to set a few scattered thoughts on…..
Afterthought: It does seem like my posts are becoming more melancholic than I would have wanted it to be. Have I been ignoring my birds of fortuity for too long? 
