On Past Lives (2023) and Serendipity

Korean In-Yun (인연) and Fate

The other day, I cancelled a meeting with a man I was supposed to meet. Then, on my way home after picking the kids up from school, I ran into the man that I had cancelled on. We bumped into each other in a dead zone between a train station and a carpark building, a small side street that has nothing on it.

This strange and unexpected meeting got me thinking about chance, synchronicity and fate, and whether I believe in pre-destined connections between ourselves and other people. I felt the same way last year when I stopped on the street for a woman who was shouting because a man was harassing her: it was a chance moment of courage that I didn’t think twice about. But in meeting her, I found one of the most complex and biggest loves of my life — it is surreal and disorienting when a small, split-second decision leads to such huge consequences.

Destiny in Past Lives (2023)

Earlier this year I watched the movie Past Lives, starring Greta Lee, Teo Yoo, and John Magaro. The movie follows a boy and a girl in Korea as they grow up, from their childhood crush on each other, to their reconnection as adults. Greta Lee, playing Nora / Na Young, has married a man named Arthur (John Magaro), and Hae Sung, her childhood crush, played by Teo Yoo, is still in love with her after many years. All three characters discuss the idea of In-Yun (인연), a Korean concept of fate coming from Buddhism.

In-Yun (인연) can mean a number of things:

1. the ties between two people over the course of their lives; often the relationship with one’s first love over the course of one’s life;
2. one’s connection with certain people or things;
3. predestined relationship; fate; destiny;
4. (Buddhism) karmic affinity; or
5. chain of cause and effect.

In the film Past Lives, it is said that it is In-Yun when “two strangers even walk by each other in the street, and their clothes accidentally brush, because it means there must have been something between them in their past lives.”

When we experience serendipity, or chance events that are meaningful to us but are otherwise inexplicable, it can be disorienting. Carl Jung explained these occurrences as synchronicity, the idea of a meaningful event that happens with no causal connection, a process that Jung believed to take place through the collective unconscious.

The connections between different aspects of our world are something humans do not understand. Even the way in which quantum particles are entangled is somewhat of a mystery — how can two particles seemingly “communicate” with each other, even when so far apart, that any communication would have to move faster than the speed of light? Synchronicity feels like another mystery.

We — people, trees, time, earth, the stars — are all connected, in some ways that we understand, and some ways that we do not. Meaningful coincidences are just one part of this. I don’t understand why I stopped for the particular woman on the street that I did. I don’t know how I ran into the man I had canceled on, on the day that we had planned to meet. There are strange machinations in the universe. Past Lives encourages us to think about them and to enjoy the magic while we’re here for it.