There is a saying whose author seems to have been lost somewhere in the vast circulation of words across the internet:
“If the rain that touches your skin travelled miles to find you, then so will the things destined to your name.”
I came across it recently and, at first, it seemed like one of those beautiful sentences that survives mainly because it is beautiful.
Then I began thinking about the rain.
Not metaphorically.
The actual rain.
A drop landing on the back of your hand on an ordinary afternoon may have begun as water somewhere you have never seen. It may once have belonged to an ocean thousands of kilometres away. Sunlight lifted it invisibly into the atmosphere. Winds carried it across regions and borders that exist only on our maps. Temperatures changed. Vapour gathered around particles too small for us to notice. A cloud formed. The cloud travelled.
And eventually, among millions of possible places on Earth, that particular water fell where you happened to be standing.
Of course, the rain did not know you were there.
It did not cross continents with your name written inside it.
Physics brought it.
Gravity finished the journey.
Yet there is something strangely moving about the fact that the universe can arrange such enormous journeys without our awareness of them.
We live almost entirely at the receiving end of processes we never see.
And I wonder how much of life is like that.
Most of the important things that enter our lives do not begin when we notice them.
We meet someone and say, I met this person today.
But that is not really true.
The road towards that meeting may have begun decades earlier.
Two families lived in different towns. Someone accepted a job. Someone else missed a train. A university admission was received. A visa was approved. A house was rented on one street rather than another. A child was born in one year instead of the next. Thousands of decisions, accidents, delays and migrations slowly moved two human beings towards the same point in space.
Then one afternoon they are introduced.
“Nice to meet you.”
As though the meeting began there.
Perhaps almost nothing begins where we think it begins.
The visible moment is only where a much longer story finally becomes visible.
A seed breaks through the soil and we call it the beginning of a plant, although months of invisible work have already taken place underground.
A child speaks a sentence and we call it a new ability, forgetting the thousands of sounds, faces, repetitions and attempts that quietly assembled themselves before the words arrived.
An opportunity appears and we call ourselves lucky, although years of learning, mistakes, conversations and small decisions may have been preparing us to recognise it.
We see arrival.
Nature contains the journey.
There is a human arrogance hidden in the way we experience time.
We assume that if nothing is happening in front of us, nothing is happening.
If an answer has not arrived, we assume there is no answer.
If our life has not changed, we assume nothing is changing.
If the thing we hope for has not appeared, we imagine the universe has remained motionless.
But look at a horizon before rain.
For a long time, the ground knows nothing.
Children are playing. Cars are moving. Laundry is drying on balconies. Trees stand in ordinary sunlight.
Hundreds of kilometres away, moisture is gathering.
None of this can yet be seen from where you are.
And still, something is coming.
There is a lesson there that has nothing to do with superstition.
Not everything approaching your life is visible from your present position.
But the saying becomes more interesting when we examine the word destined.
It is a dangerous word if misunderstood.
We sometimes use destiny as a comforting promise that everything we want must eventually arrive.
The right person.
The right job.
The house.
The recognition.
The success.
As though existence had signed a private contract agreeing to deliver our preferred future.
Nature makes no such promise.
Rain travels extraordinary distances and sometimes falls into the sea.
Seeds travel on the wind and land on stone.
Rivers change direction.
Branches break.
Animals migrate enormous distances and still encounter storms.
Nature is magnificent precisely because it is not arranged around our wishes.
So when I read “the things destined to your name,” I do not hear a guarantee that everything we desire is secretly travelling towards us.
I hear something more unsettling.
Some things will reach us whether or not we planned for them.
And some of them will change us completely.
Think of the people who now occupy the deepest rooms of your memory.
There was once a time when you did not know them.
That fact is almost impossible to feel once someone becomes part of your life.
Your closest friend was once a stranger walking somewhere in the world without any idea that you existed.
The person you love once woke up on mornings in which your name meant nothing.
Your child, before entering your life, was not yet someone whose laugh you could recognise from another room.
There are people whose absence would now rearrange your entire universe who once passed through years of their lives completely outside your knowledge.
That alone should make existence feel stranger than we usually allow it to feel.
We treat familiarity as though it had always existed.
But every person we love crossed an enormous darkness of non-acquaintance before arriving inside our lives.
One day you do not know someone.
Later you cannot imagine your life without them.
How does a human mind ever become accustomed to something as astonishing as that?
The opposite is also true.
There are people we once believed would remain forever who have already completed their part in our lives.
They came.
They changed something.
They left.
We often think departure proves that a relationship was somehow mistaken.
But nature does not measure significance by duration.
Rain touches the earth for seconds.
A season lasts months.
A tree can stand for centuries.
All three can alter a landscape.
Maybe permanence is not the only evidence that something belonged to our story.
Some things arrive to stay.
Others arrive to turn us slightly in another direction.
A conversation can do this.
A teacher can do this.
A book can do this.
A failure can do this.
Even a stranger can say one sentence that remains in your mind for thirty years.
The event may last less than a minute.
Its consequences may travel much further.
This is where the rain becomes an even more beautiful image.
Because a raindrop does not stop existing when it touches you.
It continues.
It runs down your skin.
Falls onto pavement.
Enters soil.
Feeds a root.
Moves through a plant.
Evaporates again.
What we call arrival is often merely one stage of a much longer movement.
Maybe we are like that too.
We enter one another’s lives, carrying things we ourselves received elsewhere.
A mother sings a song she remembers from her childhood to a child who will one day sing it without remembering where it began.
A father prepares food in a particular way because his own father once did.
Someone comforts you with words that another person once used to comfort them.
A teacher gives a student confidence because, decades earlier, another teacher gave it to her.
Kindness travels.
Fear travels too.
So do habits, stories, wounds, recipes, gestures, prejudices, jokes, faith, language and love.
Human beings are less like sealed individuals than we imagine.
We are passages.
Things move through us.
And perhaps this is what interests me most about the sentence.
The idea that life contains movements larger than our immediate field of vision.
We are very good at measuring what is missing.
We count the things that have not happened yet.
The message that has not come.
The work that has not succeeded.
The person we have not met.
The answer we do not have.
The future we cannot see.
But absence from sight is not the same thing as absence from reality.
Every horizon hides activity.
While you are sleeping tonight, somewhere a plane is crossing an ocean carrying someone who will matter enormously to someone else.
Somewhere a student is learning a skill that will one day save a stranger’s life.
Somewhere two people are making separate decisions that will eventually cause their paths to intersect.
Somewhere a child is being born whose work may affect people not yet alive.
Somewhere water is rising from a sea that may become rain over a city next week.
The world is continuously preparing events for people who know nothing about them.
We are all living downstream from causes we cannot see.
There is humility in recognising this.
We like to imagine that we construct our lives entirely by intention.
We make plans, set alarms, send applications, choose routes, sign contracts, book flights.
And we should.
Agency matters.
Effort matters enormously.
But even the most carefully designed life is penetrated constantly by things we did not design.
The family into which we were born.
The century.
The country.
The language we first heard.
The people who happened to live nearby.
The illnesses we avoided.
The accidents that missed us.
The strangers who helped us.
The coincidences whose importance became obvious only years later.
We steer.
But we do not manufacture the ocean.
Perhaps wisdom begins somewhere between fatalism and control.
Not sitting still because “what is meant for me will come.”
And not imagining that everything depends upon our ability to force the future into shape.
The tree does something more sensible.
It grows roots.
It reaches toward light.
It responds to seasons.
And when the rain finally comes, it is ready to receive it.
That may be the part of destiny we actually participate in.
Readiness.
You cannot command rain.
But you can prepare the soil.
You cannot decide who will cross your path five years from now.
But you can become someone capable of recognising goodness when it arrives.
You cannot guarantee opportunity.
But you can develop the skill that allows you to use it.
You cannot choose every event that will enter your life.
But you are constantly shaping the person who will meet those events.
And perhaps this is why some things seem to arrive at exactly the right time.
Not necessarily because the universe delayed them until a perfect hour.
Sometimes we simply became able to understand what had already been possible.
The same sentence can mean nothing to us at twenty and undo us at forty.
The same place can feel ordinary once and sacred years later.
The same person might have passed us unnoticed had we met them during another season of ourselves.
Timing is not only about when something arrives.
It is also about who we have become when it does.
I keep returning to the physical fact of rain.
Water rises without sound.
Travels invisibly.
Collects slowly.
Then one day the sky changes.
Maybe much of life behaves in similar ways.
The things that eventually define our existence often spend years outside our awareness.
Friendships are travelling towards their first conversation.
Ideas are travelling towards the mind that will understand them.
Children are travelling towards families that cannot yet imagine their faces.
Places are waiting to become memories.
Ordinary days are approaching that we will later give anything to live once more.
And we stand beneath all of this movement knowing almost none of it.
That is not proof that every longing will be fulfilled.
It is something, to me, much more beautiful.
It means the present moment is never the whole story.
There are always roads beyond the horizon.
There are causes already in motion.
There are lives moving towards other lives.
There are consequences still travelling from things we did years ago.
There are seeds underground.
There is water in the sky.
And somewhere beyond what you can presently see, the world is still becoming the world you will one day remember.
Maybe that is enough reason not to demand that life reveal everything at once.
Stand under the open sky long enough and you begin to understand something:
the rain only looks sudden to the person standing on the ground.
By the way, did you know that I’m actively writing in malayalam also these days. Find them here. I’ve written a small book as well if you’re into that. If you like listening to stuff, do scroll through the selection of podcasts. If you’ve time, have a look at the visuals I’ve made. Instagram link for some visual updates.
Grateful for your moment here. Keep coming back here : )