We don't want life to be too predictable.

Where's the fun in that, right?

Still, it's nice to feel like we have some authorship over our destiny.

So, should we consciously create our reality or allow life to surprise us? Do we want to make things happen, or go with the flow?

For me, those questions came pretty late in life.

Growing up, I used to live in a strange kind of reality. It was as though I wasn't really here, as if part of me was always elsewhere. I often heard people say, "Oh, her head is in the clouds," or "She's a dreamer." But I was there.

I just didn't quite feel at home. Not in a bad way. Just a little out of place.

I always felt like I was riding a wave, as though something was moving me through life and I was simply along for the ride, observing and experiencing it.

I didn't yet understand what it meant to become a conscious participant in that process—or how important that would eventually become.

The things I imagined with genuine conviction often found their way into my life in the most unexpected ways.

Outwardly, though, my life looked quite ordinary. I grew up in a quaint little town in Flanders, Belgium. My upbringing was typical of people raised in Western cultures in the 1980s. My parents divorced when I was four, so I spent most of my childhood moving between two very different worlds: my dad's restaurant and my mom's candy shop.

As a child, I also spent a great deal of time in the French Ardennes, where my grandparents lived in a little house surrounded by forests and open fields. Those quiet days in nature became a sanctuary for me. Looking back, I think those experiences deepened the quiet sense of connection that shaped the way I moved through life. 

Over time, I also began to notice that when I imagined something with genuine conviction, life sometimes responded in ways I could never have planned. I couldn't explain why, but experiences like these became one of the ways I learned to trust the quiet guidance I felt within.

One of the first memorable examples came when I was in my early twenties.

At the time, I was singing in a local band, and one evening after rehearsals, I casually told a friend that I'd love to find a band in the style of Portishead that needed a singer. Et voilà! A week later, the phone rang. It was a band called Hooverphonic. Alex introduced himself by saying, "We're a band, and we make music that sounds a bit like Portishead." I went in for an audition, and a few short months later, I was in the studio recording A New Stereophonic Sound Spectacular. The album went on to sell across the globe.

Another example came a few years later. I remember, one time, when I was a teenager, I was chatting with my mom in the kitchen when I matter-of-factly told her I was going to marry an American. She looked at me with a puzzled expression, wondering how I intended to pull that off.

Keep in mind that this was the 1990s. There was no internet, and face-to-face encounters were pretty much the only way to meet people. On top of that, I'm as introverted as they come. Randomly meeting new people has never really been my thing.

Nevertheless, a few years later, I was at a club with my sister and some friends. I was standing on the second-floor balcony, watching everyone enjoy themselves, when an attractive man came and stood beside me.

"So, what do you think of the music in this place?" he asked.

It was Mark, my future husband—an American from Los Angeles who was temporarily working in Europe.

There are so many other remarkable details to this story that I won't go into here, but suffice it to say it was yet another unexpected turn of events for this small-town Belgian girl.