In the very first Star Wars movie, Obi Wan Kenobi says, "In my experience there's no such thing as luck."
Call it luck or coincidence, but sometimes I have to agree with good ol' Obi Wan. My husband likes to keep track of the 'coincidences' in our life. I've never really thought much about them but sometimes it really does seem less like coincidence and more like pre-planning. I'm not really a fan of either scenario, but here goes.
We met when my husband hit "reply all" to a joke sent to a group of people by a mutual acquaintance. I received the email and, completely out of character for me, responded to it instead of deleting it. As things progress, we emailed back and forth, talked on the phone, and then decided to meet. It's hard to believe that was 19 years ago now. Not necessarily a coincidence or luck, but certainly an oddity. Perhaps the coincidence is that he grew up across the street from our mutual acquaintance and my ex-husband was related to the mutual acquaintance.
We started going out and things became serious fairly quickly. In the course of learning about each other and our families, we were somewhat surprised to discover that both of our mothers shared the same birth date. Coincidence? Possibly, but also not all that unusual in my mind.
Time passes and we discover we're expecting a child. A joyous event for sure! After a day and a half of labour, our beautiful baby boy is born...on the same day as both of his grandmothers. Yes, the exact same day. Coincidence? Possibly, but I was in labour for a day and a half. If the doctor had actually recommended a c-section the day before instead of 'wait and see' for a day, our son would have been born the previous day.
Those are the biggies. My husband, who likes to keep track of these things, has many more examples. The latest one in his collection is this: I just finished reading a series of four books from the same author. I went to the author's website to sign up for the newsletter to find out when the next one is coming out. I read the page on the particular series I'd read and then started on the comments section. Imagine my surprise when the first comment was from the author saying that her most favourite name was...my name! It's an unusual name and I rarely encounter anyone who can correctly pronounce it just from reading it. It turns out the author had wanted the main character to have that name, but since fans found it hard to pronounce, the publisher talked the author into changing it. Coincidence? I don't think so, but to my husband's mind it leaps out as yet another one in a long list.
These still don't convince me that coincidence or luck are real. Am I blind to them? I don't think so, but that would be just my luck!
