There are certain sentences that feel less like literature and more like recognition. You do not simply read them; you recognize something that has been quietly living within you all along.
This is how I feel whenever I truly pause at Emily Dickinson’s My Life Had Stood a Loaded Gun. Words written by a stranger, perhaps centuries ago, can suddenly become mirrors for thoughts I had never managed to articulate myself.
My Life Had Stood – a Loaded Gun –.
The metaphor has stayed with me ever since.
What if my life has stood like a loaded gun, and every experience I have lived has become another bullet?
But then another question followed.
What are these bullets really made of?
Could words themselves become my bullets in this lifetime?
Who decides where they are aimed?
Am I truly capable of deciding what this gun will yield, or am I merely the one carrying it?
For a long time now, I have been trying not to resist what people often call the flow. Yet before surrendering to an idea, I cannot help questioning it.
Can we truly persuade ourselves that such a thing exists?
We speak of flow as though it were self-evident. We encourage one another to trust it, surrender to it, and stop resisting it. Yet if there truly is a flow, why am I being carried into this one and not another? Could its mystery lie in never knowing its direction, its contents, or the story into which it has already placed us?
Despite these questions, I still believe in free will. I believe in planning, determination, responsibility, and conscious decisions. Yet I cannot ignore that life continually confronts us with boundaries we never chose ourselves: the things that happen, the things that never happen, the opportunities that quietly appear, the ones that disappear despite every effort, and the unexpected situations into which we somehow find ourselves being pulled.
If there truly is a flow, perhaps we do not simply believe in it—we eventually recognize it through the shape our lives take.
For as long as I can remember, I have believed that nothing happens in vain.
And for me, it has never been Why me?
It has always been Why this?
Life simply keeps happening to everyone.
Beautiful things. Painful things.
Ordinary things. Life-changing things.
None of them belong exclusively to us.
What fascinates me is not that these things happen.
It is how differently they continue to exist after they have happened.
The very same event may quietly dissolve into one person’s memory while becoming another person’s identity.
A conversation, a rejection, a delayed train, a city, a diagnosis, a book, a success, or even a stranger encountered only for a brief moment may continue living within someone for years—not because the event itself was extraordinary, but because of the meaning gradually woven around it.
Perhaps this is also why I have never felt comfortable with how easily we reduce life’s turning points to heartbreak.
Is that really the case?
Perhaps we call it heartbreak because every outcome eventually finds its way into the heart. Every ending, every disappointment, every unanswered question seems to leave something behind there.
But does everyone truly carry life in the heart?
Or do some carry it somewhere else? Or nowhere at all?
Perhaps that is another question altogether.
There are heartbreaks, certainly.
But along with heartbreaks, there are also mind-breaks.
Dream-breaks. Ideal-breaks. Identity-breaks.
And countless quieter fractures that rarely have a name.
Sometimes what changes us is not the loss of a person, but the loss of an idea. A certainty. A future we had already begun living inside our minds. A version of ourselves that never came into existence.
Perhaps these are the bullets.
Not the events themselves, but the meanings we slowly forge from them.
The bullet is not the rejection, the city, the illness, the book, the success, or the heartbreak. Those belong to life.
The bullet is what remains after they pass through us—the meaning that quietly settles within us, gradually shaping how we understand ourselves and, eventually, how we move through the world.
Maybe that is why nothing happens in vain.
Not because every event carries an objective purpose waiting to be discovered, but because meaning is never entirely contained within the event itself. It comes into existence in the encounter between life and the person living it.
Perhaps this is also why I have never been interested only in asking what happened.
I find myself asking a different question nowadays.
Who did it happen to?
Because perhaps that is where meaning truly begins.
The event may be ordinary. The person who carries it never is.
That ordinary event may eventually become a painting, a piece of writing, a photograph, a melody, a conversation remembered years later, or even a small pin attached to someone’s bag.
The event belongs to life.
The meaning gradually becomes part of the person.
So why am I here, thinking these thoughts and sharing them?
And why are you here, reading and witnessing my possible bullets?
Out of all the places in this virtual universe and out of all the words ever written, why would our paths happen to cross here, in this particular moment?
Maybe there is no answer.
Or perhaps there never needed to be one.
Perhaps what we spend a lifetime carrying is not the weight of our experiences, but the meanings we create from them.
And perhaps what this loaded gun ultimately yields has never depended solely on what happened to us, but on who we became while carrying every bullet.
Artwork: Expectations, Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema
Between Everywhere and Nowhere 
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