On Timing

My friend Jessica recently told me that if she had mailed off her college dorm room application all those years ago the day before or after it was actually sent she would have never met her husband. She would have had different roommates, perhaps never even meeting the girls she did room with--would have found herself surrounded by a whole group of different people. And maybe that different experience would have brought her a different love. Maybe it meant that she would have never found herself in Mankato, MN for grad school, where she would meet Jason (and me). She would have been a different person as invariably the people we surround ourselves with offer us something different and our experiences and interactions with them do help shape us, mark us, light the way for new paths to follow. Think of all the alternate lives we could have lead had we met different someones. Yes, at our core we are a certain type of person--but we are also as malleable as clay, formed and remolded again and again by our encounters and what they teach us.

It amazes me to think about how all the little things we choose can shape our lives, and there too how the timing of others' decisions connect us. Maybe we get stuck at a red light and because of that we show up at our destination minutes later and end up walking through the door at the same time as someone who could mean something to us. Maybe a person decides to listen to a song so all day they carry that rhythm with softened lines on their face, humming the tune aloud, and someone needing a reason to smile finds one as they pass that hum on the street. Your car breaks down and a stranger you would have never met stops to help--you'll forever be known to one another now. For me, whenever things don't go as planned I like to think there was a reason--maybe I avoided an accident or the wrong door ends up being better. Everything has the potential to awaken something inside of us. And it is a symbiotic nature--our choices married to those made by everyone we pass. Together we are quite the wonder.