reading. The purpose was to give Al the choice to save his own life. Over the remaining twenty-four years of our friendship, he reminded me of the events of that fateful day. Until the day my beloved friend died, he repeatedly told people, “I may not always hear the advice most people give me, but I am grateful I listened to Karen that day. She saved my life.”
I always said he listened from a different place, and that “different place” was his heart.
I can recall that urgent warning, delivered long ago in the bakery. I can see Steve’s face, and hear Al’s pain, as though it happened yesterday. That day changed our friendship, and my life in many ways.
We certainly became closer after Steve’s death, and as strange as this may sound, I delivered two other life saving warnings for Al that I didn’t have to convince him about, he heard me the first time. He told me repeatedly over the years that I was his Guardian Angel.
The wonder of that day, and the impact of Steve’s unalterable destiny, never left either of us. Those experiences with Al continued to reinforce, what I have always believed about ones destiny or fate. Of the many life lessons I have learned over the years, there is one that stands out above the rest. I had an epiphany one day, and suddenly I understood why the everyday things that all of us experience in life, both emotionally and physically, appear to be only one of two ways. They are either relatively easy, or impossibly difficult.
If you look back over the issues throughout your life, and I mean the ones that you thought mattered, you will see that there really never was any gray area, with any of them. They either came together, or resolved themselves pretty easily, or there appeared to be one painful obstacle after another put in your way, stopping it and you. When I experienced that moment of clarity, it changed every day of my life. I call it my “twenty to forty percent formula for living.”
I believe that twenty to forty percent of our lives are fated, no matter what we think, or do. They are absolute. No matter what attempts we make to avoid, or change the outcome. If something is absolute in our life, it will occur no matter what.
The other sixty to eighty percent is Free will. Like ordering a hamburger, we can have it our way, and pretty easily, any way we choose.
Free will is about having choices. If a client asks me about something that is not fated, I tell them to go ahead, don’t take that job, or buy that house, or go out with that person again. They aren’t going to miss what is destined in their life. Free will choices do not change the destiny of a person’s life.
Steve had no choices left. There was no future for me to see, because he didn’t have one. If he hadn’t died in a car accident on Sunday night, something else would have occurred, to take his life before Monday morning.
I couldn’t change what God had written for Steve, but it saddened me deeply to know that even though Steve had a wide circle of friends that loved him, not one of them knew he was an alcoholic, spiraling out of control.
There are certain elements of the work that I describe as, “a slap and a kiss.” This is when the information I have to share is very painful or difficult, but something positive and enlightening can be born from the pain. Seeing Steve’s unpreventable death was one of those. I could tell Al not to get in a car with him, but I could not save Steve. Nor could I stop Al. All I could do was tell him, but I couldn’t control what he chose to do with the information.
There have been several clients during the years, where the imminent death of someone close to them, has appeared with great clarity in the reading. Though I have certainly wished that there was something I could do to change what I have seen that is not what this work is.
When people come into this life, and are taken early, I know that they were born, on what I call, a “short clock.” No matter their age,