The delay you barely noticed may have changed which strangers entered your life.

The small delays you never thought about rearranged who you met. A missed train, a slow queue, a conversation that ran two minutes long, and the sequence of people around you is a different sequence. This is not fate arranging itself; it is simply how much of a life is assembled from positions in time that nobody chose deliberately.

Hold your explanations of how you got here a little loosely. Some of what feels like the result of your decisions was contingency, and some of what you regret as a wrong turn produced things you now depend on. That view makes both self-blame and self-congratulation harder, which is usually to the good.