Most of the consequential matters in our lives are set in motion long before we know they exist. The light you see from a star began its trip to your eyes long before you ever looked up.
The ice cream man
For eight years I sent the occasional “hello” email to a former client, a man I only knew for his work at an ice cream company in Michigan. We bonded over a parallel upbringing. He grew up a couple of blocks (and a couple of decades) from my childhood home in the Chicago suburbs and yet our paths crossed 300 miles from that common ground.
In 2018 I quit my job to pursue something undefined. I got a membership to a coworking space and committed to showing up. One night, they hosted a speed networking event and towards the end I sat down across from an older gentleman who ran a hedge fund. Our brief chat led to some small-world discoveries of our own and he invited me to listen in on a pitch to a high-profile prospect’s family office.
“Stefanie, my friend!” were the first words from the other line. To everyone’s surprise, the ice cream man was now the one running it.
The days that followed included a committed investment and a hedge fund manager astonished by my unexpected network. That one meeting catalyzed countless other rooms I got invited into that I had no business being in. It was the beginning of a grand adventure.
Shared light
Several years ago I was reading Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art for the first time. I was in an era of taking in content with a firehose and was simultaneously playing a podcast in the background. It was an interview with a pastor I had been following for years. Like the ice cream man, he had mirrored my geographic experiences of West Michigan and Chicagoland.
I reached a sentence in the book and the moment I read it, I heard the pastor quote it on the podcast. As seamlessly as if he was the voice of an audiobook. I stopped dead. I genuinely questioned if I was losing my mind. The book is written from a secular perspective, certainly not faith-based in the traditional sense - not something I expected to hear in that conversation.
The longer I’ve paid attention, the more I’ve realized something like this isn’t that unlikely.
Whenever we consume content, we join a club of everyone else who has read, watched or heard it. We carry it with us, oftentimes leading to further exploration. We look up texts our favorite authors quote. We follow suggested accounts. We click our way through what our algorithm offers. It’s actually not a surprise at all that the pastor and I were reading the same book. We’ve been drinking from the same wells for years.
Drawing the lines
Consider your life like the night sky. Every experience, every defining characteristic, everything you’ve learned is a star - and an infinite amount of lines connect to create our personal constellations. That concept by itself isn’t very profound. Until you realize our skies overlap far more than we think.
Two kids who grew up a few blocks and a few decades apart absorbed the same streets, schools and influences that sent them heading the same direction. When I look back and trace all the lines between myself, the hedge fund manager and the ice cream man the story seems less surprising and more inevitable. But seeing how something was arranged doesn’t make it any less miraculous.
Engineering vs. noticing
I am an orchestrator. I connect ideas and thoughts and people and opportunities as both a pastime and vocation. Engineering requires making choices - what to read, where to show up, who to talk to. When to act and when to wait. How to approach a problem. How to think through a solution. None of that is passive.
But the miracles come from noticing. The recognition of the relationship between our unique skies.
Most of what reaches us was sent long ago by hands we will never see. We do not choose when it left, we only choose whether we are looking up when it arrives.