The Red String Theory

There is an old Chinese belief that somewhere, invisible to the eye, a red string connects you to the person or people you are meant to find.

So, this is not a straight, clean, or direct path from you to them. The string ties itself in knots and that is the part the theory does not hide from and I respect it for that. It does not make it look as if the fate of someone is a beautiful thing. It does not promise you a clean path or perfect timing or that the people meant for you will arrive exactly when you need them, exactly as you imagined, without detour or delay. It is just the promises that the string holds. That no matter how knotted it gets, what is meant to find you will find you.

I like this theory because it exposes impatient people. It shows how we are impatient people living in an impatient world and patience is perhaps the most difficult thing the red string asks of us because fate takes time to manifest.

Some of the most significant relationships of a person’s life arrive late. After you don chop eba chop, chop eba. After you have made peace, or tried to, with the possibility that maybe some things are just not meant for you, that is when then it arrives like a thief in the night.

That is when you’ll understand the value of waiting.

If you look at some situations or relationships per say, you just wonder. Like how some connections survive things they were never supposed to survive. Distance, lack of communication from both parties, you know some certain circumstances could have ended it but it didn’t. What survives distance and every reason it shouldn’t have survived is something else entirely. It is the string holding through everything, refusing to break even when everything around it did.

I think about all the encounters in my life that felt beyond my control. The ones I did not choose but stumbled into. The ones that happened despite every circumstance suggesting they shouldn’t have. The timing that should have been wrong and wasn’t. The paths that crossed when by every reasonable calculation they had no business crossing.

These are something you cannot intentionally plan. You cannot engineer them or manufacture them or make them happen on your will. They arrive on their own schedule, in their own way, answering to something larger than any individual decision either person made. That is what makes them feel like fate.

I feel like this theory also provides a stance against our own free will. Like maybe some of the most significant relationships in our lives are predetermined, as in we don’t truly choose who enters our lives. No matter how much we resist, walk away, or try to change the outcome, the people we’re destined to meet will eventually find us. If that’s true, then our lives may be shaped by fate more than by choice.

BUT, I also still think the theory does not entirely dismiss our own free will. If anything, it shifts where our freedom lies. So, we may not have control over who crosses our path, but we do have control over what we do once they arrive.

We can decide to choose whether to hold on or let go, whether to love or leave, whether to learn from the connection or ignore it. So, fate can introduce the people we’re meant to meet, but free will determines the story we write with them.