What are the odds

A day in Ho Chi Minh, a stranger in a museum, and the invisible string of human connections

How do you actually nourish a creative passion ? For real, in the lived, messy, unplanned version of it.

I was asking myself that exact thing on my last trip to Vietnam. How do I get the most out of this, creatively, even if I only have a day here.

Context dump before the story starts : we were having dinner with friends. There was this girl with her friend at the table right next to us. We exchanged a smile. That's it. Nothing more. We finished eating, then we left.

On our way back to the hotel, we go by the Ho Chi Minh museum and I had this feeling, this need almost, to go find something artistic to live through, even if it was just me wandering around some exhibits by myself…

And then...

I'm walking through the museum, reading about the country’s and city’s history. Watching people interact with the pieces, I hear:

“Hey, how are you doing, it’s you again !”

Ho Chi Minh is not a small city. Like, at all. What are the odds of running into the exact same stranger from a restaurant, hours later, across town, in a museum. And especially this one… We started talking. She told me she actually wanted to come say hi at the restaurant earlier but was too shy to do it.

There was an activity going on in the museum, painting rice hats or clay bowls, and she asked if I wanted to join.

Obviously yes. This was literally the thing I came here looking for.

The bowl

We sat on the floor. She picked a bowl (with her friend), she brought me a rice hat. We just talked. Got curious about each other. There was this energy, I don’t really have better words for it than “connected with an invisible string,”

Before I had to leave and catch up with my group, she asked me to leave a fingerprint on the bowl she was painting. I did one. Two. On the third one I pressed too hard.

The bowl broke… My feeling at that exact moment ? I wanted to disappear. Like, actually vanish. I kept apologizing, I am so sorry, I didn’t mean to, I am so sorry, I am really sad this happened… on loop. She stopped me saying :

“Stop apologizing. It’s fine. It’s really fine. What matters to me is the experience we just had.”

We finished the workshop. I asked her and her friend to leave fingerprints on my rice hat too. Later that night, she sent me a photo.

The bowl. Glued back together. With this sentence :

“The bow has a story now”

I cried reading that text. Genuinely.

What I think this was actually about

I think this trip gave me, for one small moment, exactly what I was looking for the whole time: that sensitivity, that connection to something creative and human at once.

It reminds me of kintsugi, the Japanese practice of repairing broken pottery with gold instead of hiding the cracks.

I’d spent the whole trip trying to engineer a creative moment, find the right place, the right exhibit, the right amount of solitude. And the thing I was looking for showed up only when I stopped planning it: a stranger, a smile I almost let pass, a walk I could have skipped.

For now, I’m just grateful. To (Nga) Kat, for that moment, and for whatever it is in her that made her see a broken bowl as something worth more, worth an eternal feeling. A break that became THE STORY. Thank You !

So… what are the odds? High, I think. Higher than we let ourselves believe. The moments are already out there, walking around the same city as you. The only real question is whether you’re paying enough attention to say yes when one of them says hey, it’s you again.

Seedz Out 🌱