緣分

Today I wasted around two hours of my life watching Bachelor Pad. There was something initially intriguing about the show - stick a bunch of 20-something attractive people in a house for several weeks, and couples inevitably form. It kind of makes me think of the idea of destiny - or, 緣分, in Chinese. A lot of the times, the people that we fall in love with and think of as our soul mates are people that were simply conveniently there in the right place and the right time. Relationships tend to form out of a somewhat haphazard form of luck, which can be confused with destiny.

I sometimes wonder what I would be like if I were born in a different time, in a different place. Would I still be the same person, with the same personality, if I was born in 1920s Taiwan? Theres a part of me that thinks that our personalities are only semi-set in stone, that the rest is up to our geographical and cultural environments. Likewise, our 緣分 is not really destiny at all, its the product of right timing and right environment.

This is not to say that I think the men and women on the Bachelor Pad were meant to be together in some sort of cosmic way. I guess what I am sloppily trying to articulate is the idea that most of life is just made up of sheer luck, its usually only after the fact that we are able to reflect and go "aha, that is the way things were meant to be." So, I think it's time for me to go ahead and make my own 緣分. My life needs a bit of revamping.