Everything happens for a reason. What’s meant to happen in our lives will happen. Everything that happens in our lives, the difficult and happy moments, are meant to happen, and we are meant to grow from them. Even though in the moment things feel tough and the world feels like it’s crashing around you, life will move on, and things will get better.

 The Invisible String Theory states that you are connected to people by an invisible red string and you are destined to have an encounter with them. That means you are meant to meet the people who come into your life. The people you meet, the faces you see, the stories you hear and the experiences you gain are all connected back to you. You are meant to go through the good and the bad, you’re meant to feel all the emotions life has to offer.

“I’m a Christian,” junior Luke Rowan said. “So it’s God’s plan. He’s gonna put that person in the right place at the right time. If it is the right person, then that’s what helped bring them back to you.” 

People are connected in the most bizarre ways, running into each other on the street, having the same English class together for six years, living next door to one another, or meeting at an airport when you missed your flight. We meet new people everyday, so it’s not all but so shocking to see a familiar face in your hometown grocery store. Every experience you go through matters in some way. They shape you as a person and help you grow. The people who surround you in life will always have an impact on you. Some of those people stay and some leave, and some even leave and come back. But no matter what they do, they do it for a reason.

“When I was 18 years old and going to live in Colombia for a year, I was dating a very nice man named Daniel Connor, but I was too young,” Spanish and French teacher Micky Lynch-Conner said.  “When I came back home and went off to college there was no more Mr. Connor in my life. And well out of the blue came the right time. So I came back home and saw Mr. Connor again and now we’ve been married for a very long time since then.”

When talking about the concept of fate, many people associate it with romantic relationships. But fate is connected to so much more than that. Fate can relate back to things like meeting your best friend and getting into your dream school. It relates to all the little things within your day, like burnt toast, spoiled milk, ice cold water, and whether or not you wake up to a fully charged phone.

Fate connects people to people. The Six Degrees of Separation states that anyone can be connected to everyone by taking six “steps” (connections to people) in any friend group. You could be friends with someone whose cousin’s uncle is royalty or you could be friends with someone that your parents used to babysit when they were teenagers.

“I feel like everybody definitely has something to do with each other, like everybody meets for a reason,” junior Anna Nicole Abing said.

The Burnt Toast Theory and The Butterfly Effect are two similar ideas in the fact they both are constructed around the small things that happen throughout your day and that they happen for a reason, to paint a bigger picture in life. 

“The way I think about it, it’s like maybe there was a candy bar I really, really, wanted and then I went to the store and they were out of the candy bars,” senior Briella Hill said. “Then later that day, someone gives me that candy bar and the candy bar means so much more to me. So it’s just like the idea of having hope that everything happens for a reason.” 

Now not everyone believes in the same things. Some people believe we have complete control over what happens in our lives. That the things that happen throughout your day just happen and have no real deeper meaning.

“I think that things happen randomly and we decide how we are going to deal with the things that come our way,” 11th and 12th grade English teacher Mary Rogers said. “And that direction puts us in a direction to make another decision. I’m not against fate. I believe in happily ever afters because I have one. But personally, I like to feel like I have control of my life and not just some random force.”

I believe everything happens for a reason, that I’m meant to meet the people that come into my life and that I’m meant to go through the things that are thrown my way. The experiences in my life are going to make me the person I’m meant to be. They are so many examples that have happened in my life that really solidified my stance on why things happen the way they do.

I haven’t always lived in Louisa, I used to live in Cumberland, Virginia and I moved counties in 2018. In 2020, I met and made friends with a guy who taught me how to play the guitar. It turned out that he used to live a few doors down from me in Cumberland and that even though we had never met before, our parents actually knew each other and went to school together. As time went on he ended up moving away to a different state. We stayed in contact for a little while after he moved and he ended up moving to the state that my grandmother lives in. He actually lives only 15 minutes away from her. Even though I don’t talk to this old friend anymore, it still amazes me how connected we were and how connected we’ll always be.

The concept of fate isn’t for everybody, but it is for me. It gives me hope and the ability to float through my life when things get tough because I know that everything will be okay. It gives me hope for the future and comfort about my past. And because of that, I know that my life will work out in the way it’s supposed to.