Aren’t You Special?

What’s the practical difference between a divine plan and an organic process?

Would it matter if your story was created by god or a series of natural events?

It doesn’t matter.

Any difference between the a religious view about this and a scientific view about this is irrelevant.

Here’s why: What matters is that you have been chosen, either by god or by probability. You are special.

Your story began at the beginning of time. It sounds too epic to be about you but it’s true. You reading this blog right now is the culmination of billions of individual things that happened one after the other to get you here. You wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for the earliest humans. You wouldn’t be here if the earth was never formed. You wouldn’t be here if human’s hadn’t learned how to use fire. Do you realize that your relatives were there? Your relatives were one of the first humans to use fire. It’s true. Your relatives lived through the ice age and the invention of the printing press. Your bloodline didn’t form out of thin air. It goes all the way back.

Countless things have happened, each with a consequence. If you are of Dutch ancestry, that means that someone from your bloodline DECIDED to go to (the place which is now) the Netherlands to settle. The choice probably wasn’t an easy one. When primitive man chose an environment it was for survival. It’s wasn’t the same choice we make when we plan a vacation. Regardless, that ancestor decided to end up in the Netherlands. If they had decided to settle in what is now Germany instead, you wouldn’t be Dutch today.

When your ancestor settled in the ancient Netherlands, they met and reproduced with someone they met in the ancient Netherlands. Again, had they chosen Germany instead, they would have met and reproduced with a completely different person. That would have changed the entire trajectory of your bloodline for thousands of years. Would you, as yourself, even be here? Your genetics would be different. Your ancestral experiences would have been different. It could be fair to say that, if there was a significant change in your ancestral past, you wouldn’t exist the way you do today.

Obviously, the choice was never just between the Netherlands and Germany. There were infinite options, not only in where to live but in what to do every day, second by second, each with the potential to change everything after it for eternity.

Since you are reading this, we can say that ALL of your ancestors were able to have a child before they died. All of them. Think of the awe-inspiring luck it took for all of your ancestors to survive long enough to reproduce. That means that not one of your ancestors fell off a cliff, were killed by an animal, died from a virus or disease, were murdered by another human, starved to death or had a boulder fall on their head before reproducing. Considering the dangerous lifestyles of primitive man, this is amazing and it happened thousands of times.

There was a point, somewhere in your (anyone’s) ancestral past, when your primitive relative walked to their right, when walking left would have encountered a fatal danger. You were one turn away from not being here. How do I know this? Your thousands of ancestors made millions of decisions amidst countless potential dangers. I would bet my hat that there was more than one instance where one wrong turn could have ended you. But, it didn’t. Somehow, you made it. Something made it possible. There’s a magic to you.

We can see this in my own personal story, looking back just one generation. Both of my parents were born in the country of Turkey. However, they met in Brooklyn, New York. Consider the odds of two immigrants from the same country meeting and then consider the odds of those two immigrants getting married. This is all on top of the chances that any two people will get married and the odds that someone will get married at all.

My parents met when my mother’s car broke down and she drove it to the nearest service station, where my father was working. Now, add in the odds of my mother’s car breaking down on that specific day. Then, add in the odds of her breaking down near my father’s employer. Then, add in the odds of my father working that day. Then, add in the odds of my father not being distracted with something else during my mother’s visit. Now, we’re cranking up the fate.

There’s more. When my parents met, my father didn’t know much English. He would have only been able to connect with someone who also spoke his mother tongue, Turkish. So, on top of the rest, let’s add in the odds that my mother happened to also speak Turkish. To end this round, the odds of my parents liking each other was not small piece of luck either.

Had any of the elements of my parents’ meeting had been different, I would not be here, s I am, today.

You can list many other influences to my existence as well:

• The fact that the world was/is such a way that motivated immigrants to move to the United States.

• The reasons why both sides of my family decided to leave their home country, independently.

• The fact that my father had friends that owned gas stations willing to hire a recent immigrant

• The fact that my mother’s life was such that she could own a car and know how to drive a car

• The fact that my mother didn’t know how to repair the car herself

• The fact that my father did

These considerations and thousands more can be applied, not only to your own parents, but to EVERY set of mating people in your ancestral past. The scenario above happened in every instance, in every generation, for all of us. Each and every one of those circumstances had to be exactly as they were for your life to be as it is today.

Everything you can imagine is a result of many decisions and actions taken by many people for centuries. Had I not been born with this set of genetics or influenced by my exact influences, I wouldn’t be writing this today. There are billions of people in the world who do not write blogs. It takes a certain person. If you weren’t born with this set of genetics or weren’t influenced by your exact influences, you wouldn’t be reading this today. There are billions of people in the world who do not read blogs. This also takes a certain person.

Millions of things happened in order for us to have this interaction.

Could that not be considered fate? Can we not say that this was “meant to be?”

The question that asks if it was all planned by a higher being or if it was just an incredible amount of luck is irrelevant. Either way, we can see that we are part of something much bigger than ourselves.

The spiritual comprehension of it can be the same. Since there we so many decisions made for you on behalf of your ancestors, you could call your existence a plan, even if you don’t want to call it a divine plan.

Let go of any doubt or fear you might carry with you.   

Feel strength in knowing that, in an eternal sense, much of who you are has been shaped since the beginning of time.

You’re not a fluke.

You are meant to be here.

You are not an external visitor to this world.

You are an integral part of history, the world and the universe.

Now, act like it.

Burak Uzun is an award-winning writer and a Certified Meditation Teacher.

Burak Uzun also co-wrote a feature film called Team Marco, which was featured in over fifty film festivals around the globe and was distributed by Samuel Goldwyn Films.

Please feel free to reach out to Burak here.

Learn more about SOCA LLC and Burak’s classes here.