I don't believe in fate, but that isn't to say that I do believe in no fate (???), just that I am not in any definite camp and if someone asked me I'd be like, "no, I don't." Beautiful. Bill Shakespeare couldn't have said it better (how well read am I that I also come up with the most obvious writer for my self-deprecating statements. get on with it!). Yes.
I am however, interested in coincidences. Coincidences are much easier to come by and less nebulous, especially if you live in the same area for most of your life. Tonight I was sitting, talking with my housemates, when I saw a photograph of my housemate's friend on her computer and what looked like a good friend of mine, taken in another city. Both her friend and mine grew up in different cities, so they had clearly met recently. Then I realized that my brother was also in the photograph (less of a coincidence here, my friend Nathan is also my brother's friend Nathan, and also roommate). It turns out that Nathan and my housemate Sydney's friend both used to work together.
Not less than a half an hour later I realized that a girl from my neighborhood, whom I went to high school and college with-- who I had been randomly and unrelatedly looking at a photo of from an old shoebox of pictures moments earlier-- has a little brother that works with my other housemate. We were talking about her work place and suddenly I realized that that young man I saw behind the counter was Anna's brother. I have never met him. I visited my housemate's workplace the first and only time earlier this week, and it was his first day volunteering there from my understanding. We were just talking about her work and I remembered his face and I asked if he had an older sister, and I believe it is Anna. And I am correct!
This doesn't sound so odd, but the two incidences occurring in such a short time frame made me think about connections. This sort of thing happens. I moved into my house and eventually discovered that another of my housemates lived in the dorms with my old coworker. They went to Stanford. He is from L.A. She is from Brooklyn. We live in none of those places. They both ended up in this area and I befriended them both. He moved away and we stopped working together and then Diana moved in to our house.
I feel like I'm belaboring these details (UNDERSTAND ME! UNDERSTAND ME!), but as a person who does not believe in fate, I do wonder about coincidence. There are some people who are everywhere, and then they are gone. Like when I transferred to university at the same time as this guy Dan, with whom I went to community college. At first I saw him everywhere, and we kept getting classes together, and then at Christmas, amongst thousands of people i ran into him in Disneyland with his girlfriend. Neither of us lived in Southern California. And then I never saw him around anywhere. Why did I see him so much for a while and then in another city? And then nowhere? Hmmm? HMMM?
Or, when I saw my friend Magnus in Munich and didn't really get to say goodbye to him, and then took a five hour train ride to Trier (where he, admittedly was supposed to be the next day, still...) and I saw Magnus a few days later in that town, having dinner with some friends. It was not such a small town that it was just bound to happen. It was wonderful.
I'm sure that there are other examples, as I'm sure you have in your own life. One more: When I moved to Seattle I became friends with this guy that worked at a donut shop that I frequented. I mean, I went there everyday. I am disgusting. I was so happy! Anywho, I met this guy and we became friends and I discovered after a short while that: we are both twins (like he has a twin brother, I have a twin sister), both of our twin siblings studied psychology, he and I both studied International Relations, he participated in Model E.U. in college, I did Model U.N., we were both baptized as Lutherans, we both can do the same creepy slow wink with our eyes...
Oh! And when I was working at a coffee shop in Seattle I saw this woman who looked familiar and just guessed while taking her order that her husband was a man that I knew and really liked who shopped at a grocery store that I worked/work at in California, whom I remembered had moved to Seattle months before I did... and there have been other times where I have been seen people out of context in different cities... like my friend Jeff walking down the street in San Francisco while I was driving with my family... (these are all confirmed sightings by the way).
I don't feel like I'm making too much out of this, because beyond blogging (*gulp*) about these things, I generally forget them as soon as they happen. I might sounds like an idiot for thinking about this so much... I just wonder why that happens. Or how often it really does happen, we just don't recognize the people that it's happening with, like Marge Elliot, whom I've never met and she and I keep crossing paths, but neither of us are aware that it's happening.
I also liked learning that a perfect stranger and I had so much in common. They were mostly superficial things that became really apparent quickly, but I wonder how much you can discover that with anyone the more that you know and talk with them.
Anyone who stays in the same place long enough is bound to have some connections. I just think it's neat when reminders of this come up and smack you in the face, that the world can sometimes be really small and that we are more linked to each other than we realize. I don't know. I feel like I've willingly tried to make my life a little smaller recently, that I've scaled back socializing, that I moved out of a town where I feel very comfortable (but I'm still in another town where I may feel less comfortable in, but have deeper roots-- and is within biking distance of the other). Yet when I lived even farther away I was still ran into people from back home, and this happened enough that it wasn't until I was on another continent I was surprised not to see any familiar faces.
Well. Christmas is almost here, an I'll have plenty of time to ponder the best of my well established connections: my wonderful family. Nothing beats having roots, especially when it becomes something really beautiful. I tried to make Hannah talk to me about love and life earlier (I have a sense that people-- not hannah-- might find me a little hard to take. I'm ridiculous. and very flawed. and am not as pollyanna sunshine as I project, but I do think that those moments are the ones worth celebrating <-- gross. rachel, you're gross. just stop.) I tried to make Hannah talk to me about love and life earlier and she said to me, "blossom where you bloom." or was in "bloom where you blossom?" Shoot. I was too busy making apologies for myself to get that right. Anyway, "blossom where you bloom." Another she said is, "there is a difference between settling and settling into something." Not relevant for our purposes but I thought I'd share. Anyway. A bientot! I've exhausted this subject. Thank you for reading,
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