Small events that can drastically change your life Some people believe in fate, that certain things were meant to happen as part of some larger plan. Others see the world more as a chaos from which we ourselves derive meaning. I think this question much like the question of God is one that can never be answered objectively to satisfy everyone. It will always remain a question that each and every person has to answer for themselves. Perhaps the degree to which we see order in the universe is a measure for our own spiritual intelligence. Imagine a paper full of dots arranged randomly. If a dog looks at it he will see nothing but dots on a paper, if a human looks at it because of his creativity and intelligence he might make out certain shapes and certain figures in the otherwise random looking dots. Are the figures which the person sees on the paper there or are they not? There are many events in our lives that will feel as though they were part of fate. One of those events happened to me some 3 years ago. I was browsing the internet kinda bored and decided to visit an anonymous chatting website. I figured I could kill the time with some interesting conversations with people all over the world, I could hear their stories and ask them questions about how life there was like. I stumbled upon a Chinese girl who could barely speak English, I was buzzing with enthusiasm as I had never had contact with someone from China before. It seemed like a mysterious place to me of which I knew nothing. I asked her questions in the simplest English I could muster up and later even translated some English into Chinese to help her along. Something strange happened as I was looking upon the Chinese characters in the Google translate window. Interest began to wake inside me, the characters mesmerized me, and I had a crazy idea. What if I learned 5 new characters a day, what if I reserved a 30 minute slot in my daily routine to learning Chinese? How many characters would I know in a a month? How many in a year? And so I started doing exactly that, I ended up doing more than 5 characters a day as I wanted to progress faster. I did this quietly next to my University studies which were completely unrelated. I didn't tell my parents nor my friends, I knew they would react strangely to what I was doing, they would probably ask me why? I didn't want to tell them; because I didn't know the answer myself. I was being moved to do something that I had never considered before in my life, was I even in control of my life?