In the course of our lives, we sometimes encounter moments that feel strangely mysterious.

We meet someone at a time that seems too perfect to be a coincidence.

Information we were just thinking about suddenly appears right in front of us.

It can feel as if we are being guided by some invisible current.

In moments like these, a question naturally arises:

Was that simply a coincidence?

Or was it fate?

Today, I’d like to pause for a moment and reflect on this question.

Personally, I tend to approach this issue from two different perspectives: randomness and what I call chronocity.

First, there is the view that understands fate simply as randomness.

From this perspective, the world operates through countless coincidences.

The people we meet, the information we encounter, and the timing of events—all of these occur within the realm of probability.

However, the human brain has a particular tendency.

We naturally try to find meaning and patterns within scattered events.

As a result, even things that are purely coincidental can appear meaningful to us.

We instinctively turn them into stories.

Seen from this perspective, fate might simply be

a story created when we give meaning to coincidence.

But this raises another question.

Is everything truly just random?

This is where the second perspective emerges—something I refer to as chronocity.

Chronocity describes situations in which events are not necessarily connected by direct cause and effect, but instead appear linked through meaning across time.

For example, when you begin thinking deeply about a particular theme,

events or people related to that theme sometimes seem to appear one after another.

Or during a turning point in life, symbolic experiences seem to occur repeatedly.

Many people have experienced moments like this.

This idea is closely related to what the psychologist Carl Jung described as synchronicity.

The key point here is not whether events are connected by causality.

What matters is that they feel connected through meaning.

From this perspective, fate can be understood as

a flow of time in which events become connected through meaning.

So in the end, what is fate?

Is it simply coincidence, or is there some deeper structure behind it?

Personally, I feel the answer may lie somewhere in between.

Events themselves may occur randomly.

But it is humans who discover meaning within those events.

And the moment we recognize that meaning,

what once seemed like a simple occurrence becomes part of the story of our lives.

In that sense, fate may emerge at the intersection between

the randomness of the world

and the meanings we assign to it.

When the same event happens, some people pass it off as nothing more than coincidence.

Others see it as a turning point in their lives.

Perhaps fate is not a script that was written somewhere in the universe from the beginning.

Instead, it may be something we gradually read and weave together as we move through time.

And so I’d like to leave you with one final question.

The coincidences you have experienced in your life—

were they truly just coincidences?

Or were they part of some kind of flow

that simply hasn’t been named yet?

If you begin to look at your life while holding this question in mind,

you may start to notice faint threads of meaning in time—connections you had never seen before.

心晴れるまで

土屋梨沙