Agatha Christie begins her novel Endless Night as follows: “‘In my end is my beginning’. That’s a quotation I’ve often heard people say. It sounds all right – but what does it really mean?

“Is there ever any particular spot where one can put one’s finger and say: ‘It all began that day, at such a time and such a place, with such an incident’?”

If you’re old enough, you can recall certain life-changing moments. Whatever happened to you on that fateful day – whether it was ‘fate up to its dirty work or dealing out its golden handshake of good fortune’ – was not planned or initiated by you. It just happened. That single event determined the course or direction of your life.

On a global level, both Leo Tolstoy, in War and Peace, and Henry Fielding, in Tom Jones, believed that great events are initiated through minor causes. On the other hand, Albert Einstein unveiled a theoretical world where cause need not precede effect. Carl Jung adapted Einstein’s idea in his theory ofsynchronicity, suggesting that meaningful coincidences occur through some mechanism outside the realm of cause and effect.

Einstein posited that there is no absolute time and that past, present and future have no fixed status. T.S. Eliot expressed the same idea in his poem Four quartets: “Time present and time past are both perhaps present in time future and time future contained in time past... What might have been and what has been point to one end, which is always present... in the end is my beginning.”