Reflections on Destiny

This year, I found myself watching Paolo Sorrentino’s film Parthenope on a continuous loop.

Set in Naples, a city bathed in the eternal, golden light of the Mediterranean, the film follows the lifelong journey of its protagonist, Parthenope. Named after the city’s ancient Greek siren, her life quietly drifts through youth, ageing, beauty, devastating loss, and the endless search for meaning.

Whenever the film’s theme song, “Era già tutto previsto” (Everything Was Already Foreseen) by Riccardo Cocciante, begins to play, his raspy, raw voice fills the room:

“Era già tutto previsto...”

Everything was already foreseen, even the end of all this was expected.

There is a cruel sort of tenderness hidden in those words. It sounds like someone standing on the distant shore of time, looking back at their entire life and sighing. That melody captures a beautiful, tragic sense of surrender. It is the exact feeling I have been chewing on all year: the profound sense of destiny (宿命感).

It is the sensation of sprinting forward with all your might, only to hear the faint, metallic grinding of gears turning high above your head. You believe you are making monumental, independent choices, but in reality, you are merely turning a pre-written page in a script that was finished long ago.

Looking back at my own wandering path, from New Zealand to the United Kingdom and to Portugal, I realise that my cherished “free will” has always been gently but firmly guided by an invisible hand.

My journey to find a home in the most isolated island nation in the Southern Hemisphere was built on a series of absurd, almost impossible coincidences.

Fresh out of university, I faced the ultimate dilemma of every international student: Should I go home, or should I stay? Visa policies were shifting like quicksand, and finding a job felt virtually impossible. My logical brain was working overtime, frantically calculating variables: What are the job match rates for my major? How many months of savings do I have left? What is my Plan B?

I sent out hundreds of resumes into the void of Auckland, staring at the Southern Cross in the night sky, paralysed by anxiety.

Just as I was about to pack my bags and book a flight back to China, my life took a theatrical turn. During a last-minute trip to the South Island, I befriended a woman who worked at the Shanghai branch of Air New Zealand. We hit it off. Shortly after returning to Auckland, an Air New Zealand recruiter reached out to me on LinkedIn. As it turned out, the marketing team hiring was the exact team my new friend worked on.

During the final round of the interview, the hiring manager barely asked about my technical skills. Instead, noticing that I had recently shaved my head to raise money for children with cancer, she hired me on the spot and fast-tracked my visa.

At the time, I thought my “persistence” and “luck” had saved me.

Now, I see it differently. It was a “permitted pause.” New Zealand’s quiet nature, slow pace, and endless silences served as a massive sanctuary. It pressed the pause button on my restless youth, forcing me to learn how to be alone and listen to my own voice.

If I hadn’t stayed in New Zealand to rebuild my inner self during those quiet years, I would never have had the courage to tear down my life and start over later. New Zealand was a sanctuary designed to make me strong enough for what was to come.

Once my life in New Zealand stabilised with a comfortable income, good status, and a predictable middle-class future, that invisible force knocked on my door again.

This time, it didn’t arrive as a gentle whisper. It came as a feverish inner itch. Every morning, I would wake up to Auckland’s pristine blue skies and feel a growing void: “Is this it? Am I going to live a comfortable, slow death here?”

With no backup plan and no safety net, I made a decision that everyone around me called insane: I quit my job and bought a one-way ticket to the UK.

My rational brain was completely offline. Going to London meant throwing away every connection I had built in New Zealand to dive headfirst into a brutal, hyper-competitive rat race, facing the terrifying prospect of being thirty and starting from absolute zero.

My friends asked, “Are you out of your mind? You fought so hard for stability, and you’re just throwing it away?”

I had no logical answer. I only knew one thing: “If I don’t go, my soul will die here in this pure land.”

My body and intuition were simply being pulled by a powerful magnetic field across the globe. My first few months in London were a chaotic blur of failure and self-doubt. Standing in the grey, suffocating tunnels of the London Underground surrounded by expressionless faces, I constantly wondered if I had ruined my life.

Yet, it was in that cold, massive, uncompromising city that my soul truly expanded. I met people who cracked my mind wide open. I witnessed the heights of human art and the depths of absurdity. I finally saw both my deepest resilience and my darkest shadows.

Without that self-destructive leap of faith, I would have remained a fragile, sheltered flower in a greenhouse.

Just as I thought I would burn forever in London’s melting pot, the gears of fate shifted once more.

Burned out by intense writing schedules and London’s perpetually grey skies, my mental and physical health began to fail. Desperate for a breath of fresh air, I booked another one-way ticket to Lisbon.

The moment the plane touched down, my entire body reacted. Walking on the cobbled streets, breathing in the scent of saltwater and grilled cod, and feeling the warm Atlantic sun on my face, every cell in my body vibrated with a sense of homecoming.

Portugal is defined by the word Saudade: a beautiful, untranslatable Portuguese concept. It represents:

• A deep longing for someone or something that is absent.

• A nostalgic melancholy for things that may never have been.

• A peaceful resignation to the whims of fate.

Watching the sunset over the Tagus River, the tightly wound spring inside me, the constant urge to prove myself in London finally snapped. I realised I didn’t need to prove anything to the world anymore. I didn’t need to chase a relentless, exhausting version of success.

And so, effortlessly, I stayed.

From New Zealand in the South Pacific to the bustling streets of London, to the edge of the Atlantic in Portugal, and now back to my roots, my journey looks like a random, erratic scribble on a map.

Each move felt like an impulsive personal choice. But looking back, I realise that if a single link in the chain had been different. If I had missed one sleepless night, missed one random encounter, or received a response to a different resume, I wouldn’t be sitting here writing these words today.

As Steve Jobs famously said in his Stanford commencement address:

“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.”

Our rational minds are incredibly arrogant. When we are in the middle of a crisis, our logic fails us, leaving our intuition and the waves of fate to carry us forward. But the moment the dust settles, our ego steps in to clean up the mess and rewrite the narrative.

It tells us: “You chose the UK because you wisely calculated the career prospects,” or “You stayed in New Zealand because you had a brilliant long-term plan.”

These are beautiful lies our brains tell us to maintain the illusion of control. The truth is, at every major cliffside of decision-making, we jump with our eyes closed.

If we elevate this “sense of destiny” to a higher level, we find it is the ultimate question at the heart of almost every great philosophical and spiritual tradition.

In Buddhism, nothing happens by chance; there is only the coming together of causes and conditions (因缘和合).

“If you want to know the past causes, look at your present life. If you want to know the future results, look at your present actions.”

Every relocation, every person we meet, and every sudden decision is simply a fruit ripening from seeds planted long ago. I didn’t “choose” my path through these countries; rather, my karmic ties with these lands and their people simply unfolded when the time was right. When the conditions are ripe, the wind rings the bell; when they fade, you cannot hold onto a single grain of sand.

Taoism speaks of the universe being impartial and teaches us to align with the Tao to practice Wu Wei (non-action, or effortless action).

Life is a great river, and we are but leaves floating upon it. The leaf thinks it is steering itself left and right, but its path is entirely decided by the current, the rapids, and the wind. My sudden resignations and escapes were simply my spirit aligning with the natural flow of my life. By surrendering to the wind that blew me to the Atlantic, I achieved a sense of peace.

My favourite philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, offered a powerful remedy for the human condition: Amor Fati.

“My formula for greatness in a human being is Amor Fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it... but love it.”

A truly strong person does not fight the unpredictability of fate; they embrace it passionately. The struggles in New Zealand and the breakdowns in London are irreplaceable colours on the canvas of my life. If I erase those painful moments, the peaceful version of me sitting here today ceases to exist.

At the end of the film Parthenope, the protagonist, now an elderly woman, stands once more by the blue waters of Naples, her white hair whipping in the wind. Her eyes no longer carry the pride or confusion of her youth, only a deep, bottomless peace. She has accepted the fading of her beauty, the passage of time, and everything fate chose to give and take away.

I feel myself walking toward that same peace.

I no longer try to plan my life five or ten years into the future. I no longer torture myself trying to logically justify whether my decisions are right or wrong. I know that the invisible force that has always guided and protected me is still flowing quietly beneath the surface. It will carry me to wherever I need to go next.

The script has already been written, and the lines have been memorised in the dark.

My only job, and my greatest joy, is to play my part with passion, curiosity, and reverence on this beautiful, predetermined, and entirely unique journey.

“Era già tutto previsto...”

Yes, everything was already foreseen.

But I am more than happy to go.