I've never really been one to believe much in fate or destiny, not in a pop culture sense of the concepts... Nor do I believe that our lives are predetermined, or that our experiences are somehow mystical messages... I am not one that you will find saying such lines as "It happened to me for a reason".
I do believe in karma... but I believe that karma dictates the way we develop as people, the issues we face... things are not "given to us" to teach us lessons - rather we encounter situations and we decide how we will cope and what we will learn from them. In a sense I suppose I see life as a self determining process, and karma as being about the individual and their process of developing personal wisdom..rather than as a "greater than us" external process of an outside being/presence/force who imposes our life experiences upon us.
At the same time as this... I recognise that there are experiences in my life that are more subtle, more complex than I can always understand. There are people in my life with whom I feel a powerful connection that is not logical...it doesn't consciously make sense to me, yet I feel it powerfully. If I were someone who said "it happened for a reason" then I might say that I have a lesson to learn, or there is a special meaning for their place in my life that I am not yet aware of. But that is not me... so instead I will say that there is something about the other that touches something deeper in me...something I don't understand consciously but which drives my conscious ways of relating to them. There is something that I cannot fully understand which gives these relationships extra meaning.
Perhaps one day it will make sense... perhaps I will never understand. But I do know that I cannot fight it with logic, I can only go with my instincts and trust that it all happens for a reason :-)