It’s amazing the way that a simple incident can really make you think. A little too hard really for a Thursday morning. Don’t you know Thursdays are NOT thinking days. Our cleaner Barbara told me today that a friend of hers had died, and explained how she had come to know him.
Barbara met this man through his wife, who she initially met in an antenatal clinic. It was extraordinary how many coincidences linked their lives together. This random woman that Barbara met was called Sandra. Sandra was also pregnant, and after Barbara left that same anti-natal clinic in tears after being told she was going into hospital, Sandra too was given the same news. They had two girls, born twelve days apart. They also lived just down the street from each other. If that couldn’t be any more ‘meant to be’, Barbara discovered that Sandra used to live in the house that she, Barbara had grown up in. It seemed to me that the story was based more around their friendship, and not Sandra’s (ex) husband, the deceased. Their girls have grown up being best friends and all this because of a random meeting. Essentially it was because of their children that they had ever met.
It made me think how much of our lives are governed and how much really is just co-incidence. Perhaps there is no coincidence, but human vanity either hates being powerless and omitting to fate, or can’t take responsibility for their own lives and only look to fate. Perhaps it’s not even as closed as that.
You tend to listen to these stories more, like in terms of thinking about them afterwards, (or what I call hind-listening, the acoustic version of hindsight) when your own life is in transition. You look to how other people are dealing with their own lives, see how they get through it. It’s not all about sinking or swimming, sometimes it’s just about floating and seeing where the current takes you. I’m okay just bobbing along right now, and looking for the coincidences that fate likes to cough up every now and again. That’s enough right now.
