Red Strings

I first moved to New Mexico after I graduated from college, in 1993. Unbeknownst to me, at that same time, my wife-to-be, Melissa, was living not far away, in Santa Fe. Later, in 2001, I arrived for the first time in Bolivia, a country I made home for some nine of the subsequent fourteen years. Just three months after I arrived in Bolivia in 2001, Melissa arrived to Cochabamba, where she lived for two years before returning to graduate school. We didn’t meet in New Mexico, nor did we meet in Bolivia. However, our “invisible red strings” had begun to intertwine.

There is an East Asian belief that is found in both ancient Chinese and Japanese cultures, which translates as the Red String of Fate. According to this myth, the gods tie an invisible red string around the pinky fingers of those destined to meet one another in a certain situation or help each other in a certain way. The Chinese deity who tied the red thread is thought to be the old lunar matchmaker god, Yue Lao. The two individuals connected by the invisible red thread are destined lovers, regardless of place, time or circumstances. The magical (and powerful!) invisible red string may stretch itself and tangle, but it will never break.

Melissa and I actually met in one of the world’s largest and craziest cities — New York City — when she was on a speaking tour for a book she co-edited. As coincidence would have it, that city, New York City, would later become the setting for my book New Slow City: Living Simply in the World’s Fastest City which chronicles a year in our life, as a married couple, living minimally in New York City.