Chapter 9: Lost in Dijon, Found Something Better

Missed Connections and Accidental Turns

A few years ago, I was in Dijon, France. On a Saturday morning I set out with a very specific, very small goal: I wanted to find a particular used bookstore on the other side of the city. I had the address in my head and a general sense of north.

But a "random walk" began the moment I stepped off the Airbnb.

Three blocks in, I saw a street performer—a cellist playing something that sounded like a memory. I stopped to listen for five minutes. When I started walking again, I took the right-hand fork of the road because the sunlight hit the autumn leaves better on that side. Two blocks later, a sudden construction fence blocked my "intended" path, so I drifted one street over. Then, I saw a sign for a pop-up plant sale and spent ten minutes looking at ferns I had no intention of buying.

By the time an hour had passed, I realized I was nowhere near the bookstore. In fact, I was in a neighborhood I barely recognized.

I sat down at a small cafe table on the sidewalk, frustrated. I felt like I had "lost" the morning. I had set a trajectory and failed to maintain it. But as I sat there, I looked across the street and saw a small, community-run gallery. I wandered in and saw a painting that perfectly captured a feeling I’d been trying to put into words for months. That painting eventually became the spark for the book that you have in your hands right now.

We like to think of our lives as "Guided Walks"—intentional marches toward a career, a relationship, or a goal. But most of our days are Random Walks. We take a right turn because the coffee smells good; we stay five minutes late at the office because we’re finishing a sentence; we strike up a conversation with a stranger because they’re wearing a hat we like.

None of these steps are "the big one." But they are the steps that determine where we land.

The Quiet Asterisk in this chapter is the reminder that we are rarely "lost". We are simply on a path whose destination hasn’t been revealed yet. The asterisk sits at the end of the sentence: I am not where I planned to be *. Because the missing data isn't the map—it’s the realization that the "drift" is often where the most important things happen.

This Saturday morning drift is what mathematicians call a Random Walk. While it feels like a series of mistakes, it is actually a fundamental way that systems—from gas molecules to stock prices to human lives—explore the space around them. It is a path that consists of a succession of random steps. In physics, it’s how a drop of ink moves through a glass of water. It doesn’t move in a line; it drifts, bumping into molecules, taking a thousand tiny, zig-zagging turns until it colors the whole glass.

There are days when it feels like I am moving with purpose, and days when it feels like I am simply moving. The difference matters less than I once thought. For a long time, I believed progress was supposed to feel directional. Forward. Intentional. Like a line you could trace if someone asked how you got here. I assumed that if I was paying attention—choosing carefully, working hard, staying alert—I would move toward something recognizable. Instead, most of my life has felt like a series of small steps taken without knowing where the next one would land.

I turn left because the sidewalk is crowded.

I take a job because it’s available, not because it’s ideal.

I miss a call, forget to reply, arrive late, leave early.

Nothing dramatic. Just slight deviations. This, I’ve learned, is what a random walk feels like from the inside. Not chaos. Not destiny. Just motion shaped by chance encounters, timing, and proximity. In theory, a random walk has no memory. Each step depends only on where you are now, not how you got there. In practice, of course, we do remember. We carry disappointment, hope, embarrassment, longing. But even with memory, the path rarely feels planned.

I notice this most when I think about the people I almost knew. There’s the friend I might have had if I’d stayed a little longer at that party. The mentor I didn’t follow up with because I assumed they were too busy. The neighborhood girl I admired and smiled at for years but never spoke with, until one day she moved away. None of these were decisions. They were non-decisions. Slight pauses. Missed moments that didn’t feel important enough to mark. And yet, when I look back, they form a quiet map of alternate routes.

It’s tempting to romanticize these missed connections—to imagine the lives that could have unfolded if only one step had gone differently. But most of the time, the truth is less cinematic.

Nothing terrible happened. Nothing extraordinary was lost.

The path simply bent another way. This is something probability understands better than we do. We like to believe our lives follow arcs. Probability sees trajectories. Wandering ones. A random walk doesn’t aim. It explores. It drifts until something nudges it elsewhere.

When I was younger, I found this idea unsettling. I wanted assurance that my choices mattered—that they were steering me somewhere meaningful. The thought that so much depended on chance felt like a diminishment. Now, it feels more honest. I think of my career, if I can call it that. It looks coherent in retrospect. A narrative emerges if I arrange the steps carefully enough. But living it didn’t feel like that at all. It felt improvised. I took one opportunity because another fell through. I learned skills because someone needed help. I stayed in places longer than planned because leaving felt harder than staying. At no point did I step back and say, this is the path. I just kept responding to what was near. That’s another feature of random walks: proximity matters more than intention.

We don’t choose from all possible futures. We choose from what’s in reach. From the doors already ajar. From the conversations already started. This explains why advice is so often useless.

“Follow your passion,” people say, as if passion were a fixed destination instead of something that grows when you linger. “Make a plan,” they say, ignoring how often plans dissolve on contact with reality. Most of us aren’t navigating open space. We’re navigating crowded rooms. We bump into others’ needs, moods, schedules, histories. Their random walks intersect with ours, altering both trajectories slightly.

A casual remark leads to a new idea.

A delay leads to an unexpected meeting.

A rejection sends you somewhere you wouldn’t have considered otherwise.

From the inside, these moments feel arbitrary. From the outside—from later—they look consequential. This is where the long run quietly enters. Because while each step is uncertain, the accumulation isn’t meaningless.

When I zoom out on my own life, I don’t see a straight line. I see clusters. Periods where I lingered in similar places, emotionally and physically. Periods where I oscillated between options, unsure which one to commit to. Periods where movement felt stalled, followed by periods where everything seemed to change at once. At the time, these phases felt disconnected. Looking back, they rhyme. This doesn’t mean everything happens for a reason. That idea has never sat right with me. It puts too much pressure on accidents and too much blame on outcomes.

What feels truer is this: patterns emerge even when no one is designing them.

A random walk, over time, reveals tendencies. You drift toward what you tolerate. You stay near what you don’t actively leave. You become familiar with what surrounds you long enough.

These are not moral judgments. They’re observations.

I used to be hard on myself for periods when I felt lost. When I couldn’t articulate a goal or justify my choices with confidence. I thought something was wrong—that I was behind, unfocused, wasting time. Now I think I was just walking. Learning the terrain by moving through it.

Random walks look inefficient up close. They double back. They stall. They revisit the same spots. But they’re surprisingly effective at exploration. They expose you to variation. They let you notice what pulls you forward and what quietly repels you.

I didn’t know what kind of work I wanted until I’d done work I didn’t.

I didn’t know what kind of relationships sustained me until I’d stayed in ones that didn’t.

I didn’t know what mattered until I noticed what kept repeating.

None of this could have been optimized in advance. That realization softened something in me. It made missed connections less tragic. Accidental turns less alarming. Not every unopened door is a loss. Some are just directions you didn’t take. There’s another thing about random walks we rarely acknowledge: they’re exhausting. Moving without clear markers of progress drains you in a particular way. You expend energy without receiving the reassurance of advancement. You’re busy, but not validated. This is where comparison becomes dangerous.

When you look at someone else’s path—especially when it’s narrated cleanly—it’s easy to assume they moved with intention while you wandered. That they had a map while you guessed. But most maps are drawn after the journey. I’ve talked to enough people I admire to know this. Their certainty is retrospective. Their clarity arrived late. They, too, missed calls. Stayed too long. Left too early. Made choices based on what was nearby rather than what was ideal. The difference isn’t that they avoided randomness. It’s that they stayed in motion long enough for something to take shape. The long run doesn’t reward perfection. It rewards persistence. This doesn’t mean you should never stop or choose deliberately. Pauses matter. Decisions matter. But they operate within a larger drift you don’t fully control. Accepting this changes how you interpret setbacks. A missed opportunity stops being a verdict. It becomes one step among many. A rejection stops defining you. It redirects you slightly. When you’re in the middle of a random walk, every turn feels significant. When you look back, many of them blur together. This is not dismissal. It’s mercy.

I think of friendships that faded without conflict. We didn’t fall out. We drifted apart. Different schedules. Different priorities. Slight misalignments that compounded over time. At first, I mourned these losses intensely. I assumed someone had failed. Me or them. Now I see them as parallel walks that stopped intersecting. That doesn’t mean they didn’t matter. It means they mattered then.

The long run holds room for that kind of tenderness. It allows relationships to be meaningful without being permanent. The same is true of versions of ourselves.

I was once someone who wanted different things. Who believed different stories about success, happiness, urgency. That person didn’t disappear. They were absorbed.

Random walks don’t erase past positions. They move away from them. This helps me forgive earlier selves for not knowing what I know now. They weren’t ignorant. They were exploring. When I’m patient with this process, something shifts in how I move through current uncertainty.

I stop demanding immediate coherence. I stop narrating every decision as destiny or disaster. I let steps be steps. This doesn’t make life passive. It makes it navigable. I still care about direction. I still make choices. But I hold them more lightly. I know now that even deliberate moves will be altered by chance. And that chance doesn’t have to be an enemy.

Random walks are not aimless. They are adaptive. They respond to obstacles. They incorporate surprise. They make use of what’s available. When I trust this, I feel less pressure to justify every turn. Less urgency to explain myself to an imaginary audience. I focus instead on staying attentive. Curious. Willing. The long run will do what it does.

One day, often without warning, you look back and notice that something has formed. A rhythm. A pattern. A life that makes sense enough. Not because it was planned. But because you kept walking. And maybe that’s the quiet truth this chapter keeps circling:

Meaning doesn’t arrive through control. It emerges through motion. You don’t need to know where every step leads. You only need to stay in the walk long enough for the path to reveal itself—not as a straight line, but as a shape you can finally recognize as your own. And when you do, you realize something gentle and surprising:

The randomness didn’t derail you. It carried you here.

Which is why, even now, the only real question is not Where am I going?

It’s Am I still moving? If we accept that we are on a random walk, we can stop asking Am I on the right path? and start asking What is interesting in the neighborhood I’ve drifted into?