While at the beach
you decide to write a message in a bottle. What would it say? Who would you
like to find it?
Dear Reader,
I’m glad that you, and not somebody else, has found this
particular message in a bottle because it was written and meant for you, of
that fact, I am absolutely certain.
And how am I so sure, you might ask. Well I did a little
statistical research and studies have shown that only one out of about 20,000
bottles, sent out to sea, actually make it back to shore. Some of them sink, a few
simply float for “eternity”, whatever that means, and a majority of them are
actually held captive by that massive floating pile of trash acting as a
man-made black hole in the middle of the Pacific. So, what does all of this
mean? Well, either you finding this bottle is a completely random coincidence,
which is totally unreasonable from a statistical standpoint (though I admit,
not impossible) or this bottle was meant for you, a much more reasonable
assumption, and a good explanation for why it is in your hands right now.
Nonetheless, you have found yourself here, so you might as
well read on because the information that lies ahead is quite important. You
see, there was no point in sending you this message if it wasn’t going to
contain something profound (…of course that is all in the eye of the beholder,
profundity that is.) but I will do my best.
You received this message because like every one of us, you
are also asking the question, Why? Why didn’t you get that promotion at work?
Why did your girlfriend break up with you? Why does life have to be so tough
sometimes? Why do bad things happen to good people? And maybe it isn’t any of
these questions specifically, but either way, I can guarantee you’re asking
something along these lines because we all are. And while there are probably
some concrete answers to your questions, and if you really searched hard
enough, you would find them, I don’t think that they will be satisfactory. I
say that only because answers don’t change things, and in reality, that is what
we want. We don’t necessarily want to know why things happened; we just want
them to be different. But since we can’t change the past, we dwell on the why,
maybe in hopes of changing the future.
With that said, unfortunately, I can’t give you specific
answers to your why, nor can I change what happened. But what I can offer you
is an analogy, and maybe a little hope. Think of life kind of like this message
in a bottle. I can guarantee you that it did not take the most direct route
from me to you. When I sent it into the ocean, it bobbed back and forth and
probably floated in a completely different direction from where it was
eventually headed. But the ocean works in peculiar ways, and all I know is that
each twist and turn actually played an integral role in this bottle’s journey.
You see, the most direct route, in the end, might not have been the best one.
Our little bottle might have even ended up yet another piece of trash in the
Pacific Monstrosity. But it didn’t. And the only viable explanation is because
it was on the exact journey that it was supposed to be.
So maybe life is a lot like a message in a bottle. We can
still sit around asking why, but maybe there is a decent explanation after all.
What if every event in our lives has influenced and inspired us to end up
exactly where we are supposed to be? To find the shore that we have been headed
to all along, if you will.
In the end, this message is one of hope. You see, against
all statistical probability, this bottle found you, so chances are, you’ll find
what you’re looking for as well. Just remember, you’re headed where you are
meant to go, and you’ll get there eventually.
