Life's Entwined Paths

       "All endings are also beginnings. We just don't know it at the time." The lives of all people are tied together in the most mysterious ways. In the novel, The Five People You Meet In Heaven, the main character, Eddie, meets five different people who had some sort of connection to his life. The first person Eddie meets is the Blue Man, and Eddie is told, "That there are no random acts. That we all are connected. That you can no more separate one life from another than you can separate a breeze from the wind." Each life makes an impact on other lives around them, and those lives impact more, and they are all connected through a network of entwined paths.

        Living as a young boy, Eddie's mistakes cause the Blue Man to die. Living as a young man, Eddie's captain dies checking a path ahead of the men. As an old man, Eddie dies pushing a little girl out of the way in an accident. People die for others to live and later in life the ones that lived will die while another lives. Every life connects as one. The novel explains all the connections in people's path through life and the different affects that may and may not be noticed by some but have life impacts on another. Later in the novel we find, "each affects the other and the other affects the next, and the world is full of stories, but the stories are all one." You can look at people's lives like the water. A small lake in the mountains may seemingly have no connection to an ocean, but the water could evaporate and find itself landing in the ocean, and some of the water from the ocean could evaporate and fall as rain into a stream  that flows down a waterfall into the lake. It is then that we find that our connections are stronger than we thought they were even if we've never officially met or set eyes on a person.

       There are no random acts, everything in life has a cause and effect. Eddie ran into the road chasing after his ball, then the Blue Man almost hit Eddie and later had a heart attack, because of Eddie running into the road. All lives have effects on others which will effect others, so they are all connected and entwined together, like tangled vines.