“So, I love you because the entire universe conspired to help me find you.”
– Paulo Coelho
Life rarely follows the straight path we imagine. It curves and twists, it doubles back, it leads us to crossroads we never expected to find ourselves standing at. Sometimes, it feels like the universe has a quiet hand on our shoulders, nudging us forward, even when we don’t understand why.
Poi Dog Pondering’s Thanksgiving is a song that breathes in this mystery. It moves like a warm wind through memory and gratitude, tracing the outlines of fate’s invisible hand. The lyrics are simple, but beneath them is something profound—an acknowledgment that the choices we make, the accidents of timing, and the strange collisions of people and events are all part of something larger than ourselves.
The song speaks to those moments when we pause, maybe on a quiet evening, and look back at the winding road that brought us here. The heartbreaks and the wrong turns, the joyous surprises, the detours that felt like mistakes but ended up being the very things that shaped us. And in that reflection, we find gratitude—not just for the good times, but for all of it. Because without the storms, we wouldn’t have learned how to navigate the sea.
We don’t always see the meaning in the moment. The present can be confusing, full of questions with no clear answers. But Thanksgiving reminds us that time grants us perspective. That one day, we may look back and realize that the thing we thought was a dead-end was actually a doorway. That the people who entered our lives—some staying, some leaving—were all part of a greater story, one that couldn’t have unfolded any other way.
This song doesn’t preach or push an agenda. It simply is. A quiet revelation set to music. A reminder that life’s beauty is found in its unpredictability. That destiny, no matter how strange, has a way of weaving something meaningful out of all the threads, even the tangled ones.
And in the end, what else can we do but be thankful? For the love we’ve given and received, for the lessons we never expected to learn, for the way we’ve stumbled and somehow still found our way.
That’s the heart of Thanksgiving. And maybe, the heart of life itself.
