Coincidence? I'm not so sure...

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!

Am I Alone in the Universe?

I started this blog about a year ago as I was recovering from surgery.  Initially it was to give me something to do besides watch television during the long days of immobile recovery.  My stats tell me that my blog does get visitors, but for some odd reason it is only very rarely that anyone leaves a comment.  Should I ask for comments or are my rantings just so boring or out there that people are speechless?  Yikes…perhaps it’s only one person… 

I don’t suppose that I’m alone in the universe, in fact the evidence that at least one person checks in on me now and again tells me I’m not.  However, sometimes events can certainly lead you to the conclusion that you’re alone in the world.  Now, I’m actually an optimist at heart, although at times I get the lost, abandoned feeling.  I think that’s normal.  I do believe that things get better and there’s always a bright side; I couldn’t survive otherwise.  Life truly is all about choices and I choose to be happy for the most part.  Life’s too short to be otherwise. 

Many years ago I heard a Zig Ziglar speech where he commented that whenever he hears someone say they’re having the worst day, he always thinks “Compared to what?”  He believes – rightly so – that you’re going to spend a lot more time dead than alive and should be happy for each and every day.  If you don’t believe that, just try missing one of them!  Don’t ask me what else he had to say, but that one nugget has stuck with me almost 20 years now, so the impact was profound on me at the very least. 

It’s interesting when you think back on the things that stick with you for a lifetime.  I don’t remember too much about fifth grade except that my penmanship was finally good enough to earn my very first ballpoint pen, I had a very tall teacher named Miss Stork, and she had a quote written at the top of the blackboard in permanent marker that said, “If something is worth doing, it is worth doing well.”  That quote kind of goes hand in hand with another one I saw years later that goes, “If you don’t make time to do it right, you will make time to do it over.”  Profound.  Impact. 

Oh, and that moment when you think you’re all alone?  Look around and see how many you actually have in your support circle.  Family, friends, and sometimes even co-workers are there for you in many ways.  Like the bank commercial says, "You're richer than you think."  Isn't that the truth? 

I don’t follow the crowd.

I don’t just pay this lip service, but I actually live it.  Without trying to be or sound judgemental, lots of people make the same claim, but not many actually live it. 

Undoubtedly my non-conformity is the reason I’ve never been pigeon-holed or labelled.  It’s probably also the reason why the circle of people I consider true friends (those who would drop everything and drive to Winnipeg in the middle of winter if I called them and said I was there and needed them) is fairly small. 

When I was growing up my family moved a lot...and I really mean a whole lot!  Sometimes I’d have two or three schools within one academic year – my personal record being four high schools within the first three months.  As a result, I was always the new kid.  When this is the kind of life you lead, a couple of things happen...at least they happened to me:  (1) I became extremely self-sufficient and singular; and (2) I came to realize people were not necessarily permanent in my life and that I didn’t really need many of them.  Now don’t get me wrong, I was not lonely, but rather I was quite comfortable in being alone.  There’s a huge difference. 

This meant that peer pressure was pretty much non-existent to me.  There was no way that anyone could influence me into doing something I didn’t want to do simply because I didn’t care enough about their opinions of me if I didn’t do it.  After all, the odds were good that I’d be going to a new school in a few months or so anyway, so what did I care whether they liked me or not.  Truth be told, it’s actually quite a liberating thing because having this kind of outlook from a young age enabled me to look at things and question them because I wanted the answers.  I didn’t care what others thought. 

The greatest compliment I ever received was one my stepmother told me that my dad had said about me.  She’d been talking about me to someone and in describing me, said that I marched to the beat of a different drummer.  My father, on overhearing this conversation, said, “No, she beats her own drum.”  I have to say it’s a moment of rare insight that I wouldn’t have believed my dad would have come up with except that I believe my stepmother. 

Although my family was Catholic, we were largely non-practicing.  I’d been christened as a baby, made my first communion as a kid and had been confirmed as a young teen, but always I had the questions.  The older I got, the more interesting the questions.  What finally made me realize that religion is a bunch of bull and really nothing more than a way of controlling the mindless masses, was when I wanted to get married the first time.  My ex-husband had been married before in an Anglican ceremony and had been divorced for years.  In order for him to be permitted to marry me (Catholic) in a church ceremony, he had to do a few things.  The first was to agree to have any children raised as Catholics.  Now here’s the weird, man-made rules part.  His first wedding was considered a pagan ceremony due to the fact that it was an Anglican service, and therefore not ‘recognized’ by the Catholic church.  That being said, they wanted him to write to the Pope (really!) for his first marriage to be annulled and to obtain permission to marry a Catholic. 

That’s where I put my foot down.  I asked, rightly so I believe, “If his first marriage is not recognized by the church, why does it have to be annulled?”  No one, at any level of church management could or would answer that.  This is just one example of the hypocrisy that resulted in my giving up the Catholic religion, indeed any real belief in any kind of “god”. 

This type of opinion, however, sends spears of rage through any religious church-goer. 

People are all for “freedom of speech, freedom of expression, and freedom of religion” so long as it conforms to their own beliefs. 

I don’t judge others for their beliefs, so I’m often left shaking my head and wondering why I’m judged for mine.  If you really believe there is a god, then just satisfy yourself that I’ll be judged by that god at some point.  If you think that nothing I could say would convince you to change your beliefs, your faith if you will, then why do you think that anything you could say would change mine?  There are a lot of truly evil people out there in the world who think that because they go to church every week, all their transgressions against others are forgiven. 

I live my life attempting to do no harm to others.  If someone has faith such that they believe in a higher being, then so be it.  Good for them.  I try not to judge based on religion, beliefs or race.  After all, we are all part of the human race.  I believe that we should be kind to whomsoever we meet and in return they may be kind to us.  A lot of people preach without living their beliefs.  Some of us just live our beliefs without feeling the need to preach about it.