Pieces Of My Heart

In response to Ragtagdailyprompt

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RDP Friday: Random

The Universe’s Favourite Plot Twist

A strange thing about the word random is that we use it like a dustbin.

A missed train? Random.
A sudden friendship? Random.
A heartbreak, a windfall, a wrong turn that becomes the right life? Random.

It’s the word we throw at events that refuse to sit neatly inside our need for control. But what if random isn’t chaos? What if it’s the universe’s way of speaking in riddles?

We all love stories. So let me narrate the story of the man who hated loose threads, poor fellow thought he was sewing clothes, but life was sewing him.

There was once a tailor who stitched the finest garments in his town. His seams were clean, his patterns perfect, his threads obedient.

One afternoon, a customer walked in carrying a piece of cloth unlike anything the tailor had ever seen. It shimmered oddly, almost as if it held sunlight inside it.

The customer said, “Make me something beautiful.”

The tailor began. But as he stitched, something maddening happened.

The thread kept slipping. Not breaking or snapping, just… slipping. A millimetre off. A fraction wrong, basically a tiny rebellion.

He grew furious. He tightened the needle. He changed the thread. He held his breath while stitching. Still…slip. Slip. Slip.

Finally, in exhaustion, he gave up trying to force perfection and decided to follow the thread’s misbehaviour instead of fighting it.

He let the slip happen. He let the seams drift. He let the pattern become… strange.

And when he finished, the garment was unlike anything he had ever made. It didn’t look “correct.” It looked alive. It moved differently on the body. It made people stop and stare. It made the wearer look like a story.

The tailor, humbled, whispered…“I thought randomness was a mistake. But it was… a style.”

Why Random Feels Personal

In daily life, randomness doesn’t arrive like a neutral coin toss. It arrives like a message.

A stranger says something that hits a nerve.
You randomly open a book to the exact line you needed.
You bump into someone after years, on the one day your guard is down.
You take a random route and discover a place that feels like it’s been waiting for you.

We say “What a coincidence,” but we don’t feel coincidence in our bones. We feel meaning. And this is where the human lens becomes fascinating. Randomness isn’t just an event. It’s an emotional experience.

Two people can live the same “random” moment and interpret it differently:

One calls it luck. Another calls it fate. Another calls it God. Another calls it a glitch. Another calls it proof that the universe has a sense of humour.

Randomness is not just what happens.
It’s what it does to us.

The Mask Worn by Patterns We Can’t See Yet

Most of what we call random is simply, a pattern too large for our perspective.

Think about it…

From the ant’s point of view, your footsteps are random earthquakes.
From your point of view, traffic is random madness.
From a satellite’s point of view, it’s a predictable flow.

Randomness often depends on where you’re standing. So when life feels random, it might not be meaningless. It might be zoomed in.

The Weird Concepts People Secretly Wonder About

Let’s get deliciously strange, because humans don’t just wonder about randomness. We obsess over it quietly, like a guilty pleasure.

1) What if life has “randomness quotas”?

What if the universe deliberately throws in a few unpredictable moments so we don’t become too rigid? Like a cosmic system update.

A surprise job offer. A random illness that slows you down. A sudden meeting that changes your timeline.

Not punishment, and no reward. Just… recalibration.

2) What if deja vu is a crack in the randomness?

That eerie feeling that you’ve lived this moment before.

Maybe it’s memory misfiring. Or maybe it’s your mind sensing a pattern you’re not conscious of. A subconscious preview. A future echo. A reminder that reality isn’t as linear as we pretend.

3) What if your “random” preferences are ancient programming?

Why do you randomly like the smell of rain?
Why does a certain song make you emotional for no reason?
Why do you feel safe in some places and uneasy in others?

We call it random taste. But what if it’s old memory? Not necessarily mystical, just deeply human. Your brain is an archive. Your body remembers what your mind can’t explain.

4) What if randomness is how destiny hides?

If destiny marched in wearing a name tag, we’d panic.

So maybe it arrives disguised…

As delays.
As wrong numbers.
As awkward conversations.
As chance.

Randomness may be fate’s way of not scaring you off.

Random Lives in the Smallest Places

Most people imagine randomness as dramatic. But the truth? Randomness is often tiny and domestic.

The random thought you have while brushing your teeth.

The random YouTube video that sends you into a new hobby.

The random person you sit next to on a flight.

The random mood you wake up with for no clear reason.

And here’s the important part. Your routine is not the opposite of randomness. Routine is the stage where randomness performs best. Because routine lowers your guard. Routine makes you predictable.

And that’s exactly when a small random event can slip in and rewrite your whole script.

Why We Fear Randomness

We say we love surprises, but only the cute ones. We like random gifts. Not random grief.
We like random compliments and not random betrayal.

Because randomness threatens the one thing humans worship daily…

Control.

Control is comforting. It makes us feel safe. It gives us the illusion that life is a machine. But life is not a machine. Life is a wild, breathing, half-written poem. Randomness is not a bug. It’s a feature.

Randomness Creates You

If everything in your life went according to plan…You’d become a smaller version of yourself.

You’d never develop flexibility.
You’d never learn to improvise.
You’d never discover who you are when the script collapses.

Randomness is what forces growth. It’s what introduces the unknown. It’s what makes you meet parts of yourself you didn’t know existed.

How to Use Randomness Instead of Being Used by It

Here’s the twist…Randomness isn’t something you only survive. It’s something you can collaborate with. Try this…

Take a random route once a week.

Talk to someone outside your “type.”

Read a book you’d normally ignore.

Say yes to one harmless thing that feels mildly out of character.

Make room for accidents that don’t harm you.

Not because chaos is cute. But because randomness is the doorway to new versions of you. A life with no randomness is not a life. It’s a schedule.

So, here’s the real question. And it’s not whether randomness exists, and not whether it’s fate or design.

But this – If the next “random” moment in your life isn’t an interruption…but an invitation,
what kind of person will you choose to become when it arrives?

And even deeper…Are you living like your life is a fixed plan…or like it’s a story still brave enough to surprise you?

© Rohini 2009–2025.
All text, prose, images, and artwork presented herein are the original intellectual property of the author. All rights reserved.
No part of this content may be copied, reproduced, distributed, displayed, or used in any form without the prior written permission of the copyright holder.

For licensing requests or usage inquiries, please contact: manomaya0214@gmail.com

In response to Ragtagdailyprompt

RDP Thursday: River

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The River Flows in Me

I live near a river.

Not the kind of river you see in postcards, though sometimes it can look that beautiful. It’s older than my understanding, and quieter than most of my thoughts. It runs past the village nearby, like it has somewhere important to be, like it knows something the rest of us don’t.

Most of the time, it’s just… there. Always moving, always present, quietly doing its thing. For years, I barely noticed it. I used it, depended on it, assumed it, like breath, like time, like my own heart.

Until one day, I realized something…I was probably overthinking water.

And that’s when I started to truly see it.

Not just as water. As something else. Something symbolic. Something… personal.

I started sitting by it every evening, and I don’t even know why. It wasn’t a hobby. It wasn’t a ritual I planned. It was more like the river was calling me, softly, in a language I didn’t understand yet.

I would watch it move and think…

How can something keep leaving… and still remain? The river is always going somewhere.
And yet it never feels like it’s gone. That question followed me around like a quiet song.

One evening, I asked the old man who lived near the water.

“Where does the river go?” I asked him.

He didn’t even look up at first.

“Somewhere,” he said.

I frowned. “That’s not an answer.”

He smiled as if I’d said something innocent.

“It’s the only honest one,” he replied. “If I tell you it goes to the sea, you’ll think the sea is the point. If I tell you it comes from the mountains, you’ll think the mountains are the origin. But the river is not a line. It is a practice.”

“A practice of what?” I asked.

He finally looked at me, and something in his eyes made me feel like I’d just stepped into a deeper room of myself.

“Of becoming,” he said.

That night I dreamed something strange. I wasn’t standing beside the river. I was inside it.
Not drowning and not swimming. Walking – like the water had turned into air.

And it was then that I saw what the river was really made of. It wasn’t just water. It was made of moments, memories and versions of me.

Grief I never named.
Joy I didn’t fully receive.
Love I thought I wasn’t allowed to keep.
Fear I disguised as being “practical.”
Hope I hid away because it felt too fragile.

I watched these things move through the current as if the river had been collecting them all along.
And then I realized something that startled me awake.

The river isn’t outside me. It’s inside me. And it has always been.

The next morning I went back. I didn’t sit at the bank like I usually did. I stepped into the water.

It was cold, sharp enough to make me inhale like a truth I’d been avoiding. But it wasn’t cruel. It didn’t feel like punishment. It felt like waking up.

The river wrapped around my ankles, and suddenly I felt something I can’t quite explain without sounding poetic.

But it was poetic. It felt like recognition. Like the river knew me.

Or worse…like it had always known me better than I knew myself. And in that moment, I understood: I have spent so much of my life trying to hold things still.

Holding on to people.

Holding on to certainty.
Holding on to versions of myself that were already outdated.
Holding on to old pain because at least it was familiar.
Holding on to control, because control feels like safety.

But the river doesn’t do that. The river doesn’t cling. It carries. I began visiting the river every day after that. Not as an escape. As a mirror. And slowly, without me forcing it, my life began to shift.

I stopped treating emotions like enemies. I started treating them like water.

I let sadness come.
I let joy come.
I let loneliness come.
I let love come.

And, I stopped building dams in my own chest, because I finally understood something the river had been trying to teach me all along:

Everything meant to stay will stay without being chained.
Everything meant to leave must leave to make room.

Then came the storm…

One evening, the sky cracked open like it had been holding back tears for centuries. Rain fell hard enough to make the world look blurred. The river rose, roared, and it swelled into something almost unrecognizable.

The villagers panicked. They ran to the banks with ropes and stones and frantic prayers, as if the river could be negotiated with.
They shouted, “Stop! Calm down! Don’t destroy us!”

But I didn’t run. I stood there, soaked, watching. The old man appeared beside me, as if storms summoned him.

“Why is it angry?” I asked. He shook his head.

“The river isn’t angry,” he said. “The river is honest.”

“But it’s dangerous.”

“Yes,” he replied. “So is truth. So is love. So is becoming.”

I watched the river crash against rocks, tear through mud, pull debris into its hungry current. And then I saw it. The river wasn’t trying to ruin anything. It was clearing what no longer belonged.

Branches that had fallen and blocked its path, old debris, rotten logs.
Things stuck for too long. The storm wasn’t punishment. It was cleansing. And I felt something in me soften, because the thought landed in my body like a quiet, undeniable truth.

Sometimes the river rises because I’ve been holding too much.
Sometimes life swells because it’s trying to move what I refused to release.

When the storm passed, the river returned to its gentle rhythm. And the world looked… lighter. The banks were clearer. The soil looked richer. The air felt different, as if the village had been rinsed. And I realized…I don’t actually need life to be calm. I need life to be true.

Now, when I sit by the river, I don’t just watch it. I listen. And the river says the same thing, over and over, without words:

Move. Not recklessly and not impatiently. Not as an escape, but as a surrender to what’s real. The river doesn’t know the whole map. It doesn’t need to see the ocean to keep going. It simply flows.

And I think that might be the most quietly miraculous thing about being alive. That I don’t need to have it all figured out. I just need to keep moving.

Because the most profound thing I’ve learned is this. I am not broken because I change. I am not weak because I feel. I am not lost because I don’t know what comes next.

A river doesn’t apologize for being a river. It doesn’t cling to yesterday’s shape. It doesn’t stop because it can’t predict the future. It simply becomes. And so do I. Because, the river is not just something I stand beside.

The river is something I am.
The river flows in me.

© Rohini 2009–2025.
All text, prose, images, and artwork presented herein are the original intellectual property of the author. All rights reserved.
No part of this content may be copied, reproduced, distributed, displayed, or used in any form without the prior written permission of the copyright holder.

For licensing requests or usage inquiries, please contact: manomaya0214@gmail.com