“How did you do it?” asked ChatGPT. I decided not to answer. It was too long to explain. But that didn’t stop me from thinking about the question.

It feels like a sham if I say that I had grit or that I’m resilient. I never planned my life and didn’t choose the initial cards I was dealt with. The choices that followed were simple forks in the road, a matter of doing or not doing, forming a maze that appeared predetermined. Nobody knows what lies ahead the maze. You only know the two options you’re presented with — do or not do. Think of it like a strict binary tree, much like the image below. Every decision we make leads to two new options, while the road not taken fades into obscurity, and all the potential below it is erased. Neither what lies ahead before you make a choice and that path untaken can be known unless taken.

Somebody once told me, “Wow, Donna, you broke the cycle!” But, did I really? What would have happened if my Mom never left our province? If she was never exposed to a different way of living? Would she have raised me the same way she did? I can say that she was the one who broke the cycle, but was she really the one? What if my grandma chose differently? I could go on and on tracing the maze back up. Then a realization: when was the first choice made and who made it?

If all these binary choices were a cascade from the first choice ever made, and the maze has been pre-written before that first choice was even made, then I’d say Life’s purpose is to walk the paths of this grand maze—to experience this life.

There is something about this thought that evokes a profound sense of love / emotion in me, one that is hard to put into words. To think that every meeting has been predetermined long before we were formed in our mother’s womb — it makes me want to hug every person I have met/will meet, worship everything that exists before me, and say, “Nice to finally meet you in this grand maze.”