Today, I woke up with a plan and a certainty that it was going to be great. It has been a long time since I’ve had that specific feeling, so when the sensation arrived, I listened to it.

The plan was simple: go to a cafe to write, then meet my husband for a coffee. I announced my plan to him and floated downstairs on the golden cloud of certainty that nothing could go wrong.

Naturally, the plan broke immediately. My computer was dead. That sorted that.

So, I waited and went with my husband. A risk, because he rarely wants to sit in a cafe to work.

Upon our arrival we met a rare scene: the place was nearly empty! I giddily grabbed my coffee, a surefire sign I needed more caffeine, and practically skipped to the table.

When I looked up, I saw a lovely face staring back at me.

I paused. "Do I know you?"

I was convinced, down to a cellular level, that I did.

She began to speak, and I heard an accent familiar to mine. There is something about hearing a voice from home that softens your defenses. We started chatting (we did, in fact, not know each other), and as my husband later described it, we kept hitting these "Ding!" moments of alignment.

She was North American. Ding.

She is a psychodynamic therapist. Ding.

She specializes in neurodiversity. Ding.

The conversation felt effortless, energized, and deeply connected. It was the kind of interaction that makes you question the role of the universe, spirituality, and "meant to be."

It is tempting, in moments like that, to simply say it was written in the stars.

But I am allergic to giving away my agency. As someone whose brain makes a thousand connections a minute, I am wary of getting lost in the "woo." I resist the idea that a higher power is writing my script because I have fought hard to hold the pen myself. And so that brings me to some of the frameworks that honor the magic of the feeling without requiring me to surrender my agency.

The Fishbowl of Free Will

Of course, my brain thinks about these things a lot. In fact, I often think about neuroscientist Dr. Rachel Barr’s explanation of free will.

According to her, most neuroscientists will tell you that based on research, very few choices are fully "our own." Most things are caused by predetermined factors: our genetics, our cognitions, our resources, and our past experiences. This can feel bleak. In a world where having some choices but few options, the idea of determinism is an additional struggle.

Dr. Barr proposes a concept I love: free will in a fishbowl.

It means we don’t necessarily have a wide ocean to swim around in (even if we think we do). We may not control the size of the bowl, the water quality we started with, or the glass walls of our genetics and environment. But, every time you make a choice, you are upgrading that fishbowl.

You can’t change the bowl, but you can make it a more desirable place to live.

This framing is enough for me. When I look at the meeting in the cafe—this extraordinary coming together of shared vision and energy—I can ask: Was it the universe? Or was it the fishbowl? Who knows?

Faith as a Cognitive Tool

The problem is, my brain wants a definite answer. It wants to calculate the exact percentage of kismet versus statistics. It wants to know if the universe sent her, or if it was just probability.

I like making meaning from everything.

But trying to resolve 100% of the unknown is a recipe for burnout. It requires the need to understand everything, which takes up immense capacity. Capacity that I would like to be spending elsewhere, in problems I actually want to be solving. This is why I realized I needed to reclaim a specific tool: faith.

For a long time, I struggled with faith because it is often coupled with spaces that require you to give away your agency. And again, I am allergic to giving away my agency.

In many spiritual traditions, and even in modern manifestation circles, faith is framed as an act of submission. You are told to “surrender to the universe,” or to blindly trust a plan you cannot see, never mind check to see if you wanted. To a mind that relies on pattern recognition and critical thinking for safety, this doesn’t feel like peace. It feels like negligence.

And let’s be clear: my resistance wasn’t to the idea of surrender. In fact, learning to let go and foster a relationship with uncertainty has been extremely important in my journey. What rattled me was the requirement of making myself smaller. I couldn't accept a version of spirituality that asked me to amputate my intellect or ignore data.

I also struggled because it is often presented as a binary choice: You either have to leap blind OR you have to know everything. You are either “spiritual” and trusting, or “scientific” and cynical.

For me, faith doesn’t work like that. I choose a definition of faith that doesn’t require me to be happy in ignorance, nor does it demand that I consciously “know” everything. Faith helps me bridge that final gap of unknowing. It’s an accelerator.

To me, faith is simply restoring my comfort in my subconscious knowing.

There are times when it is worthwhile to drag that subconscious knowing into the light and analyze it. But there are other times when doing that takes up conscious capacity that I don't want to yield.

It’s not about magic, nor is it about leaning into terror; faith is a tool for energy preservation.

Faith allows me to look at the glass walls of the fishbowl and say, "I don't need to know who built this." It allows me to look at a serendipitous event and say, "That was wild," without needing to dissect the math. It allows me to reroute my energy toward the things I can control and want to influence—the choices inside the bowl.

Collecting Magnets

If faith handles the environment we can't control, we still need a strategy for the environment we can control.

Later, discussing this with my husband, he offered a metaphor that bridges the gap between the spiritual "law of attraction" and the scientific "fishbowl."

He views life like swimming in an ocean collecting magnets.

Collecting magnets is the act of developing a skill, a belief, a habit, or a behavior. These magnets naturally draw us to other people who hold similar magnets.

I don’t believe the universe sent the woman in the cafe to me. I believe that I have engineered myself—and my fishbowl—to be magnetic toward people who share my values. Even the venue played a part in this engineering. Noddy, the cafe owner, designed a space that is clean, sleek, and quiet. His way of being is kind, open, and nurturing. The probability of me and another neurodivergent person being in that specific space was mathematically higher because of the "magnets" Noddy placed in his environment.

We signal who we are before we even speak.

The Tote Bag

This became undeniably clear at the very end of our interaction.

After 45 minutes of talking about neurodivergence and therapy, she stood up to leave. As she did, her tote bag fell over, revealing the text printed on the side:

It’s not hoarding if it’s books.

I guffawed. If you could see my home, you would see walls lined with bookcases.

[Insert Photo of Your Bookcases Here]

We hadn't spoken about books. We hadn't discussed our reading habits. And yet, there was the overlap, printed on canvas.

It wasn't magic. It was a magnet. But it did feel pretty magical.

We had clearly both polished our fishbowls with specific interests, specific values, and specific aesthetics. And when those fishbowls collided, even the things we didn't say were in alignment.

I’m not giving up my agency to the universe. I’m just decorating my fishbowl with better magnets, so that when luck does strike, I recognize the writing on the bag.

Tools & Strategies

If my awareness journey here resonated with you, here are some of the tools that can help you to apply it to your own life (with examples!).