How I Stopped Believing In Coincidence
My ancient ancestors called me to live in a strange town.
I followed a feeling I couldn't explain to a town I'd never heard of, and what was waiting there still gives me goosebumps. Read this and you'll reconsider ignoring your instincts the next time they come calling.
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I grew up in the UK feeling I had no roots or heritage in that land. My parents are American. They moved to England in the late seventies and I grew up aware that all our relatives lived across the Atlantic.
At Christmas we relied on the kindness of friends to take us in, because we had no aunts, uncles or cousins to celebrate with. In my childhood I used to long for bigger family vibes, for a motherland, for the feeling of belonging to a place and a lineage.
Over the years, almost without noticing, I became British. I fell in love with the eccentric and colourful culture, I built a life and made friends who felt like family. But that early sense of not fully belonging to a place never fully left me.
Years later, when my wife and I were living in London raising young kids, we wanted to live closer to nature and in deeper community. So we began to search for our new home. For nearly two years I researched towns and villages, mostly across the southwest, where I’d grown up near Oxford. I always loved the energy of the land and the people of the southwest.
Then, on a bright spring morning in 2018, I visited a town called Frome, in Somerset. The most mis-pronounced town in the whole of England, apparently.
It was maybe the tenth or twelfth town we’d visited, and we’d felt nothing particular about any of the others. But walking through Frome, I instantly felt something I can only describe as a life force. People were out in their gardens building things. Tinkering. There was art everywhere. The coffee shops were jammed, the park was full of families, children playing, the streets alive with people. The town had a vitality to it that went straight into my body.
A sensation starting burning in my gut. I rang my wife from the park and told her that I had the strongest feeling we’re meant to live here. She felt it too.
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Making the decision to move to a town where we knew no one was frightening. It was a big leap. We knew almost nothing about Frome, other than a reputation of a thriving local community and creative scene. We were uprooting our young family and moving to a town on the strength of a feeling we couldn’t fully justify or explain.
This is the thing I’ve come to understand. Instinct and fear are often two sides of the same coin. The pull toward something that matters and the fear of reaching for it tend to show up at the same moment. And most of us make the same mistake. We read the fear as a stop sign. We treat it as a reason to stay where we are.
But the fear isn’t always a warning. It can be a signpost. It tends to be strongest precisely where something meaningful is waiting.
We moved to Frome anyway. Frightened, and certain at the same time.
What happened next still sounds, to me, like something I’d have rejected as too far-fetched if I’d tried to write it into one of the far-fetched film scripts I used to write in my days as a film director.
We moved to Frome and fell in love quickly. We made great new friends, the kids settled in fast, my wife got a great job and we all felt a real sense of home. And then, after about six months, my brother sent me a photocopied page from a family history book he’d come across.
Turns out our ancestors had lived in Frome in the thirteen hundreds, before they sailed to colonise America.
I had unconsciously returned to my ancestral home.
The same passage in the book said my ancestors had built a chapel in one of the town’s churches, with money from the king, in the 1350s. I immediately made an appointment to meet the vicar of that church.
I stood together with the vicar in this grand, ancient church, and for an hour he told me the history of my own family. He knew everything. It turned out his former wife was a distant relative of mine. And then he told me my ancestors were buried in the crypt directly beneath my feet.
I gazed down, imagining my ancestors beneath the stone floor under my feet. Me, a man who grew up feeling he had no roots in this country, was standing on top of six hundred years of them.
And then I saw it. A brass plaque on the church wall that said JOHN CABELL of FROME.
My first two names are John Cabell. And there I was, living in Frome.
It’s hard to find words to fully describe how I felt after this experience. It felt well beyond any kind of coincidence.
For the week that followed I felt high, lifted. I walked around the town as though I were floating. Synchronicities happened frequently. I felt my ancestors close, a sense of belonging I had been missing my entire life, arriving all at once.
For the first time, I understood in my body what roots and heritage and lineage actually mean. And it happened because I had listened to my instinct.
Soon after arriving in Frome, I started a company called Celestial, and we made drone light shows in the night sky, and it grew into something beyond anything I’d imagined. We made shows around the world. The opening of Glastonbury Festival. Eurovision. London’s New Year. A headline show at the Adelaide Fringe working with Aboriginal elders and artists.
But the proudest moment of all happened in my ancestral home. Two years in a row, eight thousand people gathered in the centre of Frome one night to watch a show we made for our home town itself. And at the climax of each drone show, we wrote the name of the town in enormous letters across the sky. FROME. Vast, and glowing, above the very streets my ancestors had walked six hundred years before. You could see it for miles around.
Both times I stood in the crowd and looked up at that name in the sky, and I suddenly felt my ancestors standing beside me. The people who had built a church here with a king’s money, whose bones lay in the crypt across town, whose name I carried. I had wandered back by instinct, not knowing any of it, and now I was writing our town’s name across the heavens above our home.
“Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.” (André Gide)
That same instinct that called us to Frome is the one my wife and I now live by. It’s the feeling that has called us back out on the road right now, fulfilling a long held dream to travel the world with our children.
So we sold the house and let go of the version of life that was safe and known. And sometimes it feels frightening, just as moving to Frome was frightening. We still feel trepidation every time the instinct calls. The difference is that we’ve learned that the fear usually leads to treasure.
So now, when that pull comes, the one we can’t quite explain and are slightly afraid of, we’ve learned to treat it not as a threat, but as a direction. And every time we’ve trusted it, something has been waiting that we could never have planned or imagined.
This week’s question
What is the pull you keep talking yourself out of, because it frightens you?
Sit with the fear for a moment, and then ask a different question of it - what if this fear is simply showing me where my life is trying to take me?
If this resonates please write your answer here, your words will inspire others.
Thank you for being here. Being alive, right now, is amazing. Make the most of the time you have.
Live happy,
Hoppy
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I am a former CEO, acclaimed creative, soul midwife and druidic bard. I have a dream that Aliveness becomes as impactful as Mindfulness. A daily practice that builds braver lives, fewer regrets and a more present and generous world.
Brilliant story, John. Synchronicities do happen and we do get signs all the time. Very few people notice them, let alone follow them. I live about 2 hours away from Frome, in Devon. I don’t think I have ever visited Frome though. You have tempted me to now. When I do I will visit your ancesters and say hello 💕