What is really important? What touches us today – and will not go away tomorrow? It’s the things that have moved us since human existence: happiness, love, family, partnership, time, stress, loneliness, farewell, grief.
BILD columnist Louis Hagen, coming from a German-Jewish family, sought answers to the eternal questions of mankind from poets, thinkers and researchers. And found a few answers that are amazingly simple – and yet can enrich our lives.
★★★
She sees him out of the corner of her eye, he’s looking straight at her. Not a word said yet, but somehow everything is clear.
“Two unfamiliar eyes, a quick glance, the brow, the pupils, the lids – what was that? Maybe your happiness in life… Gone, gone, never again?” wrote Kurt Tucholsky.
Is everything coincidence? Is it predetermined? Should everything be like this? Most of the readers of my “Column for Life” have a clear answer: there is no coincidence in love. It fits what was preordained.
BILD columnist Louis Hagen
Reader Ulrike from Castrop-Rauxel, for example, writes: “I met my husband in the parking lot of a supermarket. I got smashed in the door of his car. When I wanted to scold him and turned around, not a word escaped my lips. He laughed, I laughed. We have been happily married for 34 years. And that’s supposed to be a coincidence!”
Scientists call the process that everything is somehow predetermined, determinism. For centuries, clever people have dealt with this subject. No one came to a reliable result – how could they?
You come to any place in the world and at a certain hour, minute, even second you meet someone who changes your life. And this person tells you why he happened to be in this place at this very moment.
Really coincidence? Or should it be? “Therefore be vigilant. For you know neither the day nor the hour,” says the evangelist Matthew (25:13). I am afraid that the Bible means the end of life with this quote rather than the beginning of happiness in life. It is formulated to the point anyway.
Dear readers: Who wants to prove why they got to know and love each other. But it happened. And most of you, as you have told me, have not left love.
Reader Ulrike puts it this way: “Our love has changed – as have we. But all beautiful feelings change, and the most beautiful thing is love. And that was no coincidence.”
Louis Hagen (75) was a member of the BILD editor-in-chief for 13 years and is now a consultant at the communications agency WMP. His texts are available as a book at koehler-mittler-shop.de.