Everything matters

Believe it or not, everything in this world eventually influences you in a big way. You may not realise it yet, but reading this article, flicking through this site, being introduced to this or that person in particular, opening a magazine and accidentally memorizing a line from a random page will turn out one day to be essential for you. I do not know how or why, but the Universe has its way of setting up events so that each one follows on from another.

When I was a seventh-grader, our chemistry teacher got pregnant and had to leave school for a few months. As she was our favourite teacher, we felt really depressed at her absence, and at first neglected the replacement teacher. However, after a month, this barrier gradually disappeared. One day she came in our classroom feeling really unwell, and spontaneously decided that we were going to spend that class exchanging personal information. She started telling us stories of all kinds and it wasn't until I caught myself crying that I realised how great she actually was, and how much she had the potential of changing a person’s life.

She told us that her father had abandoned her when she was at the tender age of five. When they met by accident twelve years later, he was not even able to recognize her. Then at only 18, she got married and was pregnant, but her husband died in a car accident. As a result, she lost the baby because of the stress. Later on, when she was already a university student, in a Chemistry class a bottle of acid spilt on her hand and burned almost all of her skin there. Two years later, she was diagnosed with a brain tumor, so she had to undergo a series of expensive and exhausting operations.

I heard the whole story and yet somehow I couldn't bring myself to feel sorry for her, because I had never seen pain or weakness in her eyes. Not even for a minute. She was always smiling, making everybody laugh. There was something about her - I could not define it clearly – which made everybody love her. She had enchanted us all with her strength, infecting us with her determination.

It had been five years since I last saw her, when I found out I had cancer. At first I gave up, thinking I would never make it through. I refused to fight theinsidious disease and decided to simply sit and wait like a helpless victim for the tumor to finish me off. And then, my teacher’s beaming face appeared in my head, and I felt encouraged to fight back and never give up. I went through the whole procedure - operations, therapy, medication etc. until miraculously I was completely recovered!

Do you believe in fate? If not, you might as well reconsider your convictions, because everything matters down to the slightest detail, even the most unexpected thing.

Everything matters.