We look back at things through the lens of fate and can see how something was doomed from the start. Suddenly when stacked together, this happenstance becomes a divine tapestry that tells a story with a twist ending. And we have a tendency to chide these characters right when they’re in the middle of their own personal lows. But when you’re in the middle, you’ll turn a shattered mirror into a serendipitous mosaic and a black cat into a carrier pigeon of good tidings. The truth is, that some things will always arrive and when they do they will be catastrophically bad. No amount of good sense or gut feelings can sometimes stop what’s been started. What you’re left with is the opportunity to find something in the rubble.

The meteor would have always come and killed the dinosaurs. Even if the hair on their little scaly arms stood erect, only divine intervention on a massive scale would have prevented it from colliding with the planet and forever rewriting the world as it was known. But if we didn’t have the meteor we wouldn’t have the cenotes. Over six thousand stunning, clear freshwater pools that dot the Yucatan like great celestial freckles. When the meteor collided with the planet, it erupted into thousands of smaller meteorites that flew about like great dandelion seeds and pockmarked the earth to create the cenotes. Over time, these meteorite grave sites filled with freshwater to form pools as clear as an ethereal mirror. Their waters so supernaturally cool on the skin, like the ritual baptism of the earth. As if once a person dips into one they reemerge rechristened by mother nature.

It’s worth a cursory glance at the pros and cons here. Is a planet wide extinction and the resulting ice age a fair trade-off for a few thousand swimming pools? Perhaps not. But you can choose to look at it like a stacked deck or a diamond in the sidewalk crack. The truth is that most of what you get out of life is up to you. You can focus on the thunderheads in the sky or you can look down and see the heads-up pennies at your feet. There is always a moment in a bad day that you can worship with what you have left, or you can cast it aside if you’d rather not be bothered. Like I said, it’s up to you what you leave with. As for me, I’m really more of a “one good martini after a car crash” kind of gal.