What If the Letter Has Already Arrived? 

Remember the letters that kept arriving for Harry Potter, the ones his uncle tried so hard to keep from him? Harry didn’t know what was inside them. He didn’t know that those letters carried information that would completely change what he knew about himself, his past, and his future. From his perspective, they were simply mysterious envelopes appearing at the door. 

And perhaps that is why I sometimes think about that scene when I look back at my own life. Because when we are living through a difficult chapter, we have one disadvantage that the reader of a story does not have:

We don’t know what comes next.

There was a time in my life when my path seemed relatively clear. I had spent many years in academia in Türkiye. I had taught students, conducted research, published, supervised, learned, and eventually become a professor. There was a professional identity I had spent years building.

Then I moved to Canada. And suddenly, many of the things that had once felt familiar were no longer familiar.

I had to learn again.

I had to adapt again.

At times, I had to explain experience that had once spoken for itself.

I had to become comfortable with feeling like a beginner despite having spent years becoming an expert.

There were doors that did not open.

There were things I hoped would happen that did not happen.

There were moments when I wondered whether starting again meant somehow moving backward.

At the time, none of those experiences arrived looking like opportunities. There was no note attached to them saying:

“Don’t worry. One day you will understand why this happened.”

That is something we often add to the story only later.

Human beings are meaning-making creatures. When something happens, particularly something unexpected, our minds immediately try to interpret it.

Was this good or bad?

Did I succeed or fail?

Am I moving forward or backward?

Was this the right decision?

The problem is that we often try to answer these questions before we have enough of the story to understand them:

A rejection feels like a rejection because we cannot yet see the path it may redirect us toward.

An ending feels like a loss because we cannot see what will occupy the space it leaves behind.

Starting over can feel like going backward because we cannot yet see the person we might become by doing it.

This does not mean every disappointment secretly happens “for a reason.” I don't think life is that simple. Sometimes difficult things are simply difficult. But I have learned to be more cautious about deciding too quickly what an experience means. Because meaning can change with time.

Looking back now, I can see several moments in my life differently. Starting again professionally in Canada was one of them. At first, having to establish myself in a new system could feel like losing ground. Today, I see that experience differently. My academic background did not disappear when I moved countries. It became part of something new. Years spent teaching research methods, statistics, measurement, and evaluation eventually met a different professional world. Today, I work as a Senior Methodologist in Canada, applying many of those same ways of thinking to complex real-world questions. The road wasn't the one I had originally imagined. But that doesn't necessarily make it the wrong road. And then there was another letter I probably did not recognize immediately: Writing.

For years, I had been interested in psychology, research, decision making, cognitive biases, and the strange ways our minds can sometimes mislead us. Those ideas had existed in different parts of my professional life for a long time. Eventually, they became Core Mind. Writing a book for a broader audience was different from writing academically. Once again, I had to become a beginner in some ways.

How do you take decades of psychological research and make it meaningful to someone who has never studied psychology?

How do you explain cognitive biases without turning them into textbook definitions?

How do you make research useful in everyday life?

Those questions led me somewhere I had not originally planned to go. And once again, something that initially felt unfamiliar became part of my story. 

There is also a psychological reason this idea interests me. Our minds are uncomfortable with uncertainty. We naturally want to create coherent explanations for what happens to us. Psychologists have long studied our tendency to organize experience into narratives, search for patterns, and interpret new information through what we already know. But life rarely gives us enough information in the moment.

Imagine judging a novel after reading only Chapter 4. A character loses a job. A relationship ends. A plan fails. Someone says no.

If we stopped reading there, we might confidently call it a tragedy. But Chapter 12 could completely change the meaning of Chapter 4. Real life works differently from a novel, of course. There is no guarantee that every difficult chapter leads to a beautiful ending. Still, the analogy has changed the way I think about uncertainty. Perhaps we should be a little slower to put a final label on an unfinished story.

That brings me back to Harry Potter. The fascinating thing about those letters was not simply that they kept arriving. It was that something enormously important was already present before Harry understood its significance. I wonder how often that happens in ordinary life. Perhaps a “letter” is not a letter at all:

Perhaps it is a conversation you almost didn't have.

A job you didn't get.

A country you never expected to call home.

A subject you suddenly become curious about.

A person who challenges the way you think.

A project that scares you.

A failure that forces you to reconsider your direction.

Or simply that persistent little thought: Try one more time.

We usually recognize turning points only after we have passed them. While we are living them, they often look surprisingly ordinary. Sometimes they even look like setbacks. I can identify some of my own letters now. Others, I suspect, I am still in the process of understanding. And perhaps there are some sitting metaphorically at my door right now that I haven't even recognized yet. Maybe you have some too. So if there is something in your life today that you cannot quite make sense of, perhaps you don't need to decide immediately what it means. Maybe you simply haven't reached that part of the story yet.

Sometimes the letter has already arrived.

We just don't know what it says yet.

If this post made you pause, even for a moment, you may enjoy exploring it further in Core Mind: The Psychology of Mind Illusions. The book examines the hidden cognitive biases and mental shortcuts that quietly shape our decisions, memories, beliefs, and everyday lives, helping readers better understand not only how they think, but why they think the way they do.

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