Her day does not really start until the sixteen-year-old Honda Accord sputters into action, belching dark gray smoke through the rusted tailpipe, but somehow it eagerly growls to go one more time. She dreads the day, which she knows will come one day, when the car will no longer respond to the turn of the key. That day looms ahead but she can’t worry about that for now. She has two places to go this Wednesday. The trip will not be too far and each home is close to each other. It’s not something she plans as a matter of routine. It just happened to be so today. For someone who used to plan everything this is something that just happened. While she should be grateful, it frustrates her that her life is now distilled into, “it just so happens”. She doesn't want her life to be one giant shrug but it is now. She shifted to drive. She’s on her way. Back in the days her friends and everyone who knew her indeed used to say, “She’s on her way”, but it had a different meaning then. Much too different. Today, “she’s on her way” simply means she might get to her first appointment without a hitch.
I wrote the above as opening paragraph to a short story that went as far as five standard printed pages of single space but never got around to finishing it. Just recently I was going through some old files when I saw the manuscript I started years ago that came to an abrupt end, inexplicably it seems, because to this day I have no explanation for it. In fact I quit at mid sentence on the fifth page and apparently had forgotten about it over time. And it had what I thought was an intriguing plot in progress, yet to unravel.
Well, I might as well try to put the above paragraph to good use. If the reader has time to spare, I'll try to meander from that into something else.
Life, as it goes on, presents us occasionally with what seems like it gets going because "it just so happened" and the hope is that more of it is good than the not so good. Then, there is also about life unfolding for anyone of us on our way to doing and achieving something or going somewhere on purpose and it gets us there, as hoped for. We would like to think that much of it is/was planned to go a certain way and not that it may go the way we didn't expect, let alone hoped for. Are the odds of 50-50 fair?
Obviously, we would never settle for 50-50 odds of things happening to us for the good and bad, would we? But these things do happen. At a minimum we all would prefer that things happen North of the 50-50 odds. Sadly, for some, it is south of it, tragically deep southerly and downwards, for others.
If we each review our individual lives today - young, middle age, retired - we find that indeed there were strings of "it so happened" instances that may not have been part of the "plan". Some were good and perhaps some not so. I will venture to say that for most of those among my readers good happenstances outnumber the not-so-good overwhelmingly for their lives to be that of or close to the fabled Island of Serendip.
Was it just serendipity that I started my career with a multinational company but stayed there only for three years - enough time for me to meet my wife who happened to work for the bank that the company used? I ended up leaving that company and spent the rest of my career for another multinational corporation that spanned a 12,000 mile move across the globe. I tease my wife that the only reason I started working at the first company was so I will get the chance to meet her. The most pivotal one is that of her application to come to the U.S. long before I met her. She did not act on it when we met after it was approved. Ten years later somebody at the U.S. Embassy in Manila resurrected her application and wrote to her about it. It so happened that her parents home address had not changed where the letter was addressed. Did it "just so happen" made it possible for her and her family - husband, two sons, five grandchildren - to be at a place where much good than bad happened. Our entire lives would have been completely different if not for the fact that my wife completed that application and for someone at the U.S. embassy to have chanced upon a forgotten paperwork. There were many other happenstances that occurred - too long to enumerate here. The thing is we were put at a place in far better circumstances had it not been for many, many things to happen just right.
Now, dear reader, if you look back you will see that your life, despite twists and turns, is what it is today because things just so happened. We are all somewhere at some point in time partly because it just so happened. Not to be minimized is the fact that sometimes, if not more so, for some of us some things happen almost, if not truly, providentially like a dream. We commonly refer to them as lucky breaks. Or, are they? And why do others have the lucky breaks while others do not?
Two of the most popularly read of my musings I wrote almost four years ago, months apart are: "Everything Happens for a Reason?" and "Ancestry, Fredericksburg, Texas". Both, written in 2018, encapsulated what I believe are the complexities of the "it just so happened" phenomenon in the unfolding of everybody's story. We can see that it is a mix of serendipity (something good happened unexpectedly), something good comes out of adversity, truly good things do happen to those who strive to make them happen and there is truth in the idea that something truly providential just happens to many of us that are beyond reasonable expectations.
From all of these we try and find answers for why certain things happen. However, we also find that it is not so much that things happen but what it is that we do to make the most of it, if it were good; and how we responded when it wasn't? We find easy answers sometimes, and we search for reasons why on others.
One thing we cannot do, of course, is to turn our lives into one giant shrug. I guess I did meander back to the paragraph above afterall. I would like to finish that story. Sometime.
https://abreloth.blogspot.com/2018/05/ancestry-fredericksburg-texas.html
https://abreloth.blogspot.com/2018/02/everything-happens-for-reason.html
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