Catch the Right Ball When Fate Throws It

“For this, you have to let people and the world come close to you and see: Does it touch me? Do I reject it? What does it do to me? This requires spiritual openness. This is not an academic or scientific path. It is not about learning vocabulary or grammar or about acquiring techniques and methods, but about developing and training this spiritual openness. When you step out into the world, life throws a multitude of balls at you. It is only about catching the right ones. These are offers that fate presents to you, and it then takes presence of mind and evidence to say at the crucial moment: “Yes, now I’ll grab it!””

“I call such situations experiences of evidence. Evident is something that convinces through immediate perception. It does not require lengthy argumentation, any special method, prior knowledge, or expertise to recognize something as evident. When something is evident, it no longer needs examination or lengthy analysis. Although it is quite likely that you wrote a detailed checklist for apartment hunting. It lists everything that is important to you: location, size, price, amenities. You certainly also had specific demands regarding sportiness and stability for the new bicycle in advance. And possibly you also had clear ideas about the appearance, character, or hobbies of the man or woman of your dreams. But in the concrete situation, you have an experience of evidence before you even considered the first point on your checklist. Only afterwards do you go through the criteria one by one and check whether what seemed obvious stands up to critical scrutiny—where it quite often happens that certain real aspects do not correspond to the ideally conceived conditions. Then you start to correct the checklist, for example by attaching less importance to individual criteria. “A sturdy luggage rack on the bike isn’t really that important to me. After all, I don’t really go on such long bike rides that I would need to carry a heavy bag.” Or by turning the negative points into positives: “It would be more convenient if the nearest supermarket were within walking distance from the new apartment. But it’s only two bus stops away. And it’s much healthier anyway if I ride my bike there, then I get a bit of exercise at the same time.” Or we throw all the good arguments into the balance in order to make up for one or two shortcomings: “Okay, I can’t discuss soccer with the woman, but she looks great, has a big heart, and is incredibly smart!””