Do our thoughts have any influence on events of the future?

Is it all just fate? Or can we influence the future with our actions and even thoughts?

Disclaimer: I’m doing fewer and fewer disclaimers lately because I care less and less if my writings are out there or my thoughts are not mainstream enough. I’m experimenting, I’m having fun playing and it makes me smile.

If you’re looking for some hard science or the score of the Warriors’ game, just stop now and go read some hard facts. We’re heading away from science here.

What if a chain of events occurs and there’s no way to prove how each event fell into that particular sequence? Even if there were video footage of what happened, it still couldn’t explain why it happened or if one event led to the next.

Fate

I forgot my hat at a friend’s. She said she’d bring it to me next time we met or that she’d send it. I didn’t hear from her for a while and then there was the Christmas holiday. Then I saw her at the end of the holiday and she said that she sent it. I never got it. She said she had sent it on Dec. 14 and we had left on Dec. 17. My guess was that it arrived with the mailman and was stolen from our porch. We had renters at our house so I thought maybe the renters put the box somewhere, but I searched the house and it was nowhere to be found. I asked my friend and she checked and So it was gone and that was that.

Or was that the end of the story?

Intervention or Influence

The rational, flesh and blood, regular person wouldn’t think much more about it. But this was no ordinary hat. It comes from a place that is one of my favorite spots on the planet. It’s a place where my world is at peace, where the weather is whatever it is and it couldn’t be any different. It’s one of those places where there’s no place I’d rather be.

The hat came from there. From a shop that’s only open a few months per year because the lake it only open a few months per year. It gets snowed in and they don’t clear the roads. It makes it even more interesting that you can’t go there. It’s not the 24/7/365 world that we’re so used to. It’s hard to get to so you appreciate being there even more.

The shop also carries different things every year. It’s just an old General Store with ice cream, postcards, some basic supplies and a few items of clothing with the name of the lake on it. There’s a nice little balcony where you can have your ice cream and watch over the lake.

It wasn’t just a hat. To me.

I’ve been playing around with focus and intention and clarity. I pondered the idea of getting my hat back. But even with a snowmobile and a crowbar, it was pretty much not terribly feasible to get a replacement. How could I get my original cap back?

Watch out, here comes another …

Disclaimer: I’ve become open (read: wide open) to pretty much anything anyone has to say. It’s just fun. If there’s a wacko or a nutcase or a fairy or someone who talks with angels or ghosts, I don’t not believe it anymore. It’s not even that I don’t believe them. I believe that they believe it and that’s OK with me. But I’m curious. I’m open.

I played around during a few meditations with focusing on my hat. I could see it so very clearly. I have worn it for a few years and it’s faded and what I especially enjoy is that my sweat has seeped through the brown and discolored the base of it. It’s almost bleached. It’s one of those things that is so much more than the cotton and stitching that makes it up. It has taken on something of a more connected status for me.

“You have to believe it before you can see it.”

I didn’t “need” my hat. I’ll be fine without it. I’ll get a new one next summer, I suppose. Although it will be different, of course. But that’s OK, that hat served its purpose and apparently had lived out its existence.

I focused on it and visualized it and, I don’t know, imagined that I had it back. But that was about it. Then I forgot all about it.

My friend emailed to say that the post office said that the hat should have been underway on Jan. 2, so maybe it was still around and still could be delivered. But it was maybe Jan. 10 by then. It was surely just a lag. She emailed a few days later saying, “Hey, I have your hat!” The post office marked the envelope as “unrecognized address” or something and sent it back to her. She later read me the address and it was correct. So what happened?

How could such a turn of events come about? Sure, the “fate” and most of the world would just say, “That’s just how it happened.” But others might say that I had an influence–or something or someone had an influence.

Personally? I don’t know.

But the difference between how I see things these days and how I used to see things is that I’m open to it. I’m pretty much open to anything. If someone says it might have happened like A then I’m willing to hear them out. If another says it happened like B, then let’s hear that out, too.

I’m less interested in the science and the facts and more interested in possibility. Does that make me a nutcase? A weirdo?

I think it just makes me free.