When I was fifteen years old, I had picked up a copy of Carl Sagan's Cosmos, which led to the collapse of my Bible-centric view of the world. Since then I'd prided myself on being the most skeptical of skeptics, the most left-brained of left-brainers. I studied physics in large part because it seemed like the least dogmatic subject, the furthest possible thing from faith.
But eventually I realized there were limits to scientific inquiry. Life, after all, wasn't a controlled experiment. It was just one chaotic iteration of infinite potential, utterly unique in all of creation. Choosing how best to spend it would take more than the methods of science employed over the span of a lifetime. It fundamentally required a leap of faith in one direction or another, whether you realized you were taking it or not.
My initial, unconscious 'faith' had been to organize my life around societal measures of success. That had collapsed after I graduated from college. My new version of faith, which I was slowly piecing together, accepted what my senses and intellect offered and then kept going, trying to stay open to the world and to the vague impulses that quietly directed my actions and seemed to recognize truth better than I could. You could call the source of these impulses God, the Tao, the muse, Allah, the collective unconscious, or a by-product of evolution as it blindly followed the laws of subatomic interactions. But labeling it wouldn't get me any closer to understanding its nature or intentions, blind or otherwise.
Whatever it was, I was pleased with the results so far. Sitting under a thunderstrom on a porch in the West Bank with a seeker like Yusif was better than anything I could have thought up on my own, much less bought and paid for. I supposed I could only be grateful and hope the uiverse knew what it was doing. For now I had no better ideas.
"I've just been following my nose," I said, "waiting for inspiration to strike."
"I think you're looking for light," he said matter-of-factly. "And you shouldn't worry. When you're following your destiny, the whole world conspires to help you."
I smiled. People had been more helpful lately than I had any right or reason to expect. Nothing in my upbringing had prepared me for this level of kindness from strangers.
