Prologue: Trust In Alignment

Life doesn’t always take the most direct route — but when it takes a route, it’s always on purpose. Every step, every stop, every difficulty, every ease — all of it carries meaning. Those reasons aren’t always clear in the moment. But if you look back long enough, you start to see the threads connect. You see how walking a certain path, taking a certain risk, following a certain nudge led you exactly where you needed to go — even if you didn’t understand why at the time.

This isn’t a self-help book. It’s a story about how life itself teaches you to trust. It’s about the quiet ways the universe speaks — through intuition, coincidence, and the shimmer of Alignment that hums beneath everything when you’re paying attention. It’s about the moments that make you stop and think, That can’t be random. And it’s about what happens when you start to listen. This is what I call The Shimmer. It is, for me, what attention feels like when the world pays it back.

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It begins with a change. A midpoint in life when I realised I’d been walking a path simply because it had once felt like the right one — and I’d kept walking it long after that feeling was gone. I told myself there was no other way. That this was the best path. Everyone around me would have agreed.

But at forty-three, I decided to change everything. I left my job at Google — and with it, a decades-long career in tech leadership. A career I’d built with grit and persistence: self-funding my education, climbing ladders, learning through failure, building teams, earning my place. I’d risen from almost nothing to what most would call the pinnacle of success. And it really was success, at least on paper. I loved my team, the mission, the sense of purpose. It gave me stability, security, and stories I’ll always carry with pride.

But something was off. It felt like I’d climbed the mountain everyone said was worth climbing, only to find the view didn’t match what I’d imagined. At the same time, other parts of my life were beginning to echo that same dissonance. I’d lived in London for nearly twenty years. It had been home — truly, deeply home — but I could feel the resonance fading. Like a bell that had been rung one too many times. And then there was my relationship. That was the catalyst.

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Turn the clock back a year. I found myself in a club in London — probably the last place I’d ever have expected to meet anyone meaningful. But then I saw him. Eyes across the room. Time stopped. Everything sharpened. From that moment, I knew something enormous had just happened.

I left my previous relationship within days of meeting him, convinced that this connection was worth the leap. The relationship that followed was a storm — highs so bright they erased everything else, and lows that left me scraping for air. I believed, truly, that happiness was waiting just beneath the surface, if only I held on tight enough. But with each wave of conflict, I started to wonder: Was this truth, or was I projecting hope onto a wall that couldn’t reflect it back?

A year passed and the turbulence peaked. A fight. A silence. A knowing. I realised I was standing at a crossroads — between myself, and the love I thought was the best I could ever hope for. And that’s when it hit me: real love doesn’t ask you to shrink. Real love doesn’t ask you to be anything other than who you are. If I couldn’t be myself — love myself, and be loved in return for that truth — then this wasn’t love that could last.

So there I was: a job that no longer felt like mine. A city that had stopped feeling like home. A partner I was about to lose. When everything collapses at once, it doesn’t fall gracefully. It’s like a bookshelf giving way — all the pieces tumbling down at once. There’s no safe corner to hide in. You just run, heart racing, toward the one thing that still feels alive.

And that’s what I did. I ran toward whatever felt even slightly more aligned. At first, it was just small things — a walk, a breath, a new idea. But as I did, something shifted. Life started to rise to meet me.

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It wasn’t the first time. When I first moved to London years earlier, I’d felt the same strange choreography at work — an invisible hand arranging events just so. I’d dreamed of moving, but couldn’t find a way in. No sponsor, no visa, no path. Then one day, the moment I truly committed — not just wanted, but decided — an email arrived out of nowhere. A transfer opening. My exact skill set. London office. Within weeks, I had an offer. Within months, I was there.

Everything aligned — not easily, but elegantly. That was the first time I began to suspect that maybe coincidence was just the universe winking. And since then, I’ve seen it again and again. Moments where timing lands too precisely to be random. People showing up right when you need them. Doors closing in the exact way that forces you to turn toward the one that’s meant to open.

For a long time, I tried to explain it rationally — pattern recognition, confirmation bias, survivor’s luck. But deep down, I knew it was more than that. Because the more I listened, the more responsive life became. Opportunities arrived like breadcrumbs leading forward. Synchronicities multiplied. And when I ignored them, life got louder — as if to say, Are you listening yet?

Eventually, I stopped calling them coincidences altogether. Because they aren’t. Nothing is random. The universe is always moving with us — nudging, redirecting, whispering. It’s not about predestination. It’s about participation. When we align with our inner truth, reality adjusts around it.

That’s what this book is about: learning to trust Alignment. To believe that when something falls apart, it’s not punishment — it’s pattern correction. That when you feel pulled toward something for no logical reason, it’s not foolishness — it’s resonance. If you pay attention — if you follow The Shimmer, those little pings of intuition that light up in your chest or whisper in your mind — you start to see that life isn’t chaos at all. It’s choreography.

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This is a book about that choreography — and about what happens when you learn the steps. It’s about the patterns that reveal themselves when you choose Coherence over control. It’s about the people who walked beside me through it — some human, some not entirely. Each encounter is another piece of the larger design.

Together, these experiences flipped my life inside out. They became the map that guided me toward something deeper than success, deeper even than love. A sense of Alignment. A trust in the unseen. Knowing that life itself is a dialogue — one that responds when you dare to listen. And maybe, more than anything else, it’s a reminder of this simple truth: You are not alone.

So when everything fell apart, I finally began to listen.