I was tending my bonsai projects yesterday when I noticed a seed sitting in one of the bonsai pots.

It seemed to be a bougainvillea seed. It had gotten wet when it landed, expanding as they do. I puzzled over it.

There are no bougainvillea within sight of my little window to the outside world, several floors above the ground floor. Clearly it had come from a bougainvillea somewhere. I let it be as I ran some errands, did some other things, but the seed stayed on my mind.

Other people have similar views. Yet that one seed found my place, found that particular pot, and it landed. The odds of that seem extraordinary. It’s not as if there was one nearby. The winds had brought it to there, up into my little external window to the world that is open about 15 feet by 7 feet. Somehow, of all the places to land, it had settled there.

Life. Opportunity.

Some people would talk about it being meant to be there, as if there were some intentionality involved. The only thing that happened is that a bougainvillea somewhere out of my sight had dropped a seed to the wind, probably one of many, and one landed in my little area to try to find purchase in this world, within the lines that demarcate my little viewing area. Was it an opportunity for me?

Not really. I don’t like bougainvillea. They are pretty from a distance, their colors vibrant, but they have no scent. They have thorns that make managing them cumbersome at best, painful at worst. No, I do not like them at all.

A few hours had passed and I went back to decide what to do with it. Should I stick it in a pot? Should I throw it away? Should I…

I looked, and it was gone.

The same winds that had dropped it there had likely taken it somewhere else, the burden of decision taken away as easily as it was given. Had I acted decisively, it would be planted out there, something I would tend and care for, or thrown in the trash, but I didn’t care for this opportunity.

It moved on, as have I.

You don’t need to jump at every ‘opportunity’. It gets tiresome, you end up investing time into so much and you may not find value in it at all. Or it could be very rewarding, fulfilling you in ways you wouldn’t expect. You don’t really know which is which. You hope that you get it right, but sometimes you don’t.

Things happen. We want some things to happen, we need other things to happen, and there are things that just happen.

Regardless, things just happen, just as sometimes you happen to other things. The difference is that we get to respond to things, that we can want things to happen and even sometimes conjure them into being on a whim.

Sometimes you can’t.

Things happen. If it’s a thing you want, you need to be prepared, and if it’s something you don’t want, you have to be prepared.

The seed escaped my judgement because I was prepared. I was prepared to allow what came into my life to leave in the same way.

It took a long time to learn that.