Photo: Homemade at Flickr
Serendipity: is the effect by which one accidentally discovers something fortunate, especially while looking for something else entirely.
I believe there is a purpose, there is a destiny and there is serendipity. Sometimes the worst thing that happens to you ends up being the best thing ever happened. But I don’t believe your life has a pre-set plan, your destiny changes according to the way you live your life. Serendipity happens and you discover things you didn’t even know you missed in your life.
I met over a 50-year-old woman just recently and she told me she was planning on a trip to Austin, Texas to listen to one of her old high school friends to play in a band. He never really knew her even back in the high school, but I guess she had always had a crush on him. She had googled him, and now she is obsessed with seeing him again after all these years.
First I thought that this lady was crazy. What is she thinking that this man is going to say to her after she just shows up..?
Then I started thinking about it more, and especially after seeing again an old movie called
Serendipity, I am much more willing to admit myself that if for any reason things hadn’t worked the way they did with my husband, I might be googling him right now.
When I met Matt, we spent an amazing 20 hours together. We were young, we were living the romantic adventure in Europe like you see in the movies. And like in the movies, I didn’t get his phone number, and I was afraid that I’ll never see him again.
He called the next day, and we set up a date the same evening at the only place we both knew – the
Hauptbahnhof (train station) in Frankfurt am Main, Germany.
When I went to the train station to meet Matt, I waited and waited and he didn’t come. I was standing in the front of the train station and I decided I wasn’t going to leave without seeing him. I felt like my entire life was at that moment. I had no idea if he was even coming, or if he was just late.
So I waited. For over two hours.
And finally, he did come. Over two hours late.
What if I had given up waiting and just left, would he have called me again?
What if he had thought he was too late, no point to even show up anymore, and been too embarrassed to call me after that?
The thing is that if we hadn’t had our happy ending, the 20 amazing hours with him would have probably haunted me the rest of my life, and I would be googling him right now.
Live like you mean it – the biggest regrets will be the things you didn’t do, not the crazy things you did.
Like moving in with Matt the day he was two hours late on our first date. Or moving to the other side of the world a few months later and getting a rescue dog a week later. We still have the dog, a rescue mutt we named
Frank, for Frankfurt of course.
