The Chain Reaction of Us

our story is made of chain reactions – we are just the sum of tiny miracles pretending to be coincidences.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the fig tree analogy I wrote about in my last post- the idea that life isn’t a straight line but a canopy of choices, a thousand paths branching above us, each fruit representing a different version of who we might become. Once you start seeing life like that, it becomes impossible not to notice how delicate the whole structure is. The branches don’t just split during the dramatic moments- the exam results, the heartbreaks, the big moves- but during the tiniest shifts in our everyday rhythm. The tree bends and curves with every whisper of a decision: the texts we hesitate over, the conversations we almost avoid, the strangers we speak to without knowing why. And the more I think about it, the more I realise that the branches of our life aren’t only shaped by intention. They’re shaped by coincidences, accidents, timing so precise you only understand its impact years later. 

And then the universe threw an extra thought onto my path, a TikTok that said, “You can change an entire timeline just by sending a risky text or talking to a stranger. You need to be playing with the fabric of reality.” At first it sounded like the usual sort of spiritual internet poetry, something to make you giggle a bit perhaps, but something about it stuck. Because isn’t that exactly what the fig tree teaches us? That every tiny movement creates a new future? That one action, one moment of bravery or curiosity or chaos, can shift the whole architecture of your life? And the more I sat with it, the more I felt this strange truth that we are constantly, unknowingly nudging the universe. We are altering our timelines in microscopic but monumental ways. It made me look back and trace the shape of my own branches,  how one small thing led to another, how the paths wove themselves into the life I have now. 

For me, the clearest example starts with something as tiny as the fact that my sister couldn’t swim when we were younger. If she had been able to, I probably wouldn’t have started swimming lessons myself. If I hadn’t swum, I never would have taken up rowing – because rowing was originally just a way to keep fit during Covid, nothing more than Plan B conditioning work. If I’d never rowed, I never would have improved, never would have started searching for rowing schools, never would have thought about leaving home. Then I never would have found Shrewsbury. And if I hadn’t come to Shrewsbury, I wouldn’t have met the friends here. I wouldn’t have met, for example, Isla, who is currently sketching a tattoo design that I might one day decide to ink permanently onto my body. And if I do – if that design becomes part of me –  imagine one day someone noticing it. Imagine they ask about it. Imagine we get talking. Imagine, somehow, that this becomes the person I end up marrying. A whole future, an entire life, born from the fact that my sister couldn’t swim. 

That is the beauty of it,  the impossibility, the absurd, breathtaking chain reaction of it all. Every little thing triggers everything. And when you start mapping out your own life this way, it feels like stepping back and finally seeing the pattern woven between every moment you’ve lived. It is chaotic and delicate and precise all at once. 

Sometimes I get this strange sensation, almost metaphysical,  that certain moments are aligned with a kind of cosmic intention. I don’t mean fate in a strict sense, as if everything is predetermined and we’re just passengers. It’s more that some things feel so cleanly timed to be pure chance. Like there is a rhythm to the universe, a quiet choreography guiding us gently toward the people we need to meet or the places we are meant to land, even if the timing looks accidental on the surface. 

I felt that sensation intensely with my friend Paula. She came to Shrewsbury from Germany for an exchange year – a whole chain of decisions that easily could have gone differently. She ended up in my boarding house. She rowed. I rowed. We met. And somehow, without effort or expectation, she became one of those friends who feels foundational, like she belongs in my life in a way that defies coincidence. Now she’s back in Germany, but she is still one of the people I hold closest to my heart. On my birthday she wrote me a message I think about often: “Every day, I think back on our time together and the incredible coincidence that brought us together. If we had both made just one different decision, everything might have turned out differently. But luckily, that didn’t happen. You could almost think the universe meant for us to meet.” 

I read that and felt this warm ache because she put into words exactly what the butterfly effect feels like from the inside. The tenderness of realising that a friendship, one of the most important I’ve ever had, depended on an infinite number of tiny alignments. If either of us had made a single different choice, we never would have met. And yet we did. Perfectly, improbably, beautifully. 

When you zoom out even further, the coincidence becomes almost cosmic in scale. Think about the chances required for you to even exist. The sheer number of ancestors that had to survive, meet, fall in love, cross paths, or simply end up in the same place at the same time. The millimetres of timing required for conception. The wars they lived through, the loves they found, the heartbreaks they endured, the countless moments that could have ended a line before it reached you. You are the result of thousands upon thousands of years of branching pathways that somehow managed to wind their way toward one specific outcome: you, alive, in this exact body, in this exact moment, reading these exact words. 

And the same is true for everyone around you. Every friend you adore, every person you’ve ever loved or lost, every stranger you will one day meet – they all carry the same miraculous lineage of aligned choices. And the fact that your timelines overlap, that you occupy the same century, the same city, the same room, the same conversation, the same second – it is almost too magical to understand for me. It is the most delicate miracle of existence, a universe of near-impossibilities converging into one tiny shared moment. 

And what fills me with the most awe is that this miracle isn’t static. It’s not something that happened once. It’s happening constantly. You are still shaping the branches. You are still choosing the fruit. You are still bending your timeline with every breath, every impulse, every risk, every message you send, every street you decide to walk down. You are not just living your timeline, you are actively rewriting it. You are playing with the fabric of reality, whether you realise it or not. 

Of course, not every branch feels beautiful when you’re standing on it. Sometimes bad things happen, painful things, terrifying things, and in those moments it feels like the universe is collapsing rather than aligning. It feels like everything is shattering instead of splitting into new possibilities. But even those moments hold their own kind of shaping power. Even the heartbreaks, the disappointments, the failures become pivot points we only understand later. Life has a strange way of revealing that the branch you never wanted to take has carried you somewhere you needed to be. 

I don’t think “everything happens for a reason” means that everything is good or destined or deserved. I think it means that everything becomes woven into your story. That no moment is wasted. That even the painful branches lead somewhere meaningful, even if the meaning is invisible at the time. 

And when I step back and look at it all (the randomness, the precision, the heartbreak, the joy, the coincidences, the tiny triggers that spiral into entire futures) I feel this overwhelming love for life. For the chaos of it. For the softness of it. For the way everything is always shifting, always branching, always blooming into new forms. It is beautiful beyond words that your life can change in a single second. That you can send a message, speak to a stranger, turn left instead of right, and begin an entirely new future. 

Every action has meaning. Every moment has a ripple. Every tiny decision is a doorway. And once you start to see life this way, as a living, breathing fig tree of infinite futures, it becomes impossible not to fall in love with the miracle of being here at all.