DESTINY

My wife and I met at a natural food store called 'Erewhon' in California.  I had a long history with Erewhon by this time.  Erewhon started in Boston. It was begun by Michio Kushi and his wife Aveline Kushi.  Their life long dream was to improve the mental and spiritual health of people through diet and the ancient understanding of yin and yang.  I moved to Boston to study with Michio and in less than a year I had created a pushcart, which was really a steam table on wheels that sold natural food dishes, as inspired by the Kushis,  on the street in front of Boston University and ,within the next year, also in front of M.I.T. and Government Center, a very busy commercial district in the heart of downtown Boston.  Years later I was a frequenter of Erewhon in Los Angeles.  Angela,  my wife to be,  had just arrived in town within the last week or ten days.  She originally wanted to get a fill in job at the cafe next door, called 'The Nowhere Cafe.'  When she went over there to apply she found out that the cafe was not hiring, but  the Erewhon Store, which was a sister store to the Nowhere Cafe, (Erewhon spells nowhere backwards....sort of); that the Erewhon store was hiring.   Anyway she was working there at Erewhon for about a week behind the soup counter when I arrived looking for a bowl of soup, which I found, and, also, looking for a life companion, which I also found.  As I write this, Angela, that's her name, and I have been together for thirty-four years.  The soup, of course, was dispensed with within the hour.

What were the chances of us ever meeting?  I had gone back and forth about staying in LA or moving back to New York.  Angela had her own back and forths about leaving the midwest and coming out West to California.  Would I have gone into Erewhon if I didn't have a long history with it?  Would she have been working there if the Nowhere Cafe, which I had never been to, had a job opening?  There are so many seemingly serendipitous events that happen in the getting together of any couple.  And yet, so many couples are convinced that the other was the one person that they were destined to meet.  How could that be true?  Yet how come that feeling of 'destiny' is experienced so strongly in so many people.  Many widows and widowers are convinced that their deceased was the one person that they were destined to be with and that kind of 'rightness' in relationship and the feeling of seeking a shared destiny is no longer available to them after the death of their spouse.

I don't believe that we are receiving some sort of over arching guidance that determines all the specifics, going back for generations, that resulted in the particular, unique personality, that is you, to encounter and become enamored of that particular unique individual who, also, has been the recipient an endless series of seemingly serendipitous events, not only in her life, but in the lives of her ancestors,  that resulted in her being the particular person that she is and landing in the particular place that she happened to be in at a certain 'special' moment.

Does that make me a cynic.  Not at all.  I believe that we are all moving back to Oneness.  That we are separate aspects of One being and we chose to experience this world of separation, but that we are ultimately destined to return to the Oneness from which we came.  This journey back to union, which can and often is experienced with another person, but can be experienced with oneself and one's God, or with a cherished activity, or with an environment, a culture, a pet, a hobby; this feeling is so special, seeming to be the experience that we were born for; this feeling that we were meant to be in this relationship and the more we explore it, the closer to Oneness we get, is the most profound movement that we make in this life.  And it is our destiny to travel this road with whomever or whatever we are travelling it with.  We were lucky to find this person, or activity, or subculture, where we had enough compatibility to begin this journey.  But the journey itself, that is a destiny that we share with all creatures and the journey itself, can be made in many ways and with many people.  I am not undervaluing it, at all.  It is every bit as special as you think it is.  And I believe in monogamous relationships, through which an understanding can deepen between two people and oneness is realized over time at deeper and deeper levels.  Yet, it is not exclusive.  We have this capacity to take this journey with anyone else and with whatever else is open to take this journey with us. Our destiny, which we feel so strongly, is to move back toward Oneness; and we experience that with anyone that we are compatible enough to feel it with.


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