It's both amazing and unbelievable how things seem to fall into place at just the right time. Fortuitous. Fortuitous. Fortuitous. Most people have it at that and thank the constellations for such outrageous luck. It's fortune, most would like to think, and I, both benefactor and recipient, am the fortunate one. To a certain extent I have no qualms about this philosophy, for what can be more beautiful than the elegance of surprise? Or the wonder of that once-in-a-lifetime convergence of two seemingly improbable things, moments, or people? Or the chance meeting of a girl and a guy sipping lattes at opposite ends of some coffee shop, who for whatever reason hearts have for acting that way, not knowing each other, are still swept away by one another?
You sing thanksgivings to the stars; chug down a solitary SanMig or two for luck and the road; go to bed with a smirk, half-thinking maybe about these incredible encounters with life's randomness; and in the silence of our dreams,... who knows?
But then that gets me thinking. How can an encounter so dear and important to me, be merely ruled by chance? How can the marvel that is my experience be simply reduced to the products of its Time and Space? Surely there must be a deeper and more inherent reason at play.
Take the coffee shop girl and guy for example. Was their connection brought about by being in the same place and time? Why, hundreds of people pass by Starbucks everyday! Perhaps ladies more lovely or men more dashing have passed by and yet the connection shared by the two aforementioned characters is different. Was it because of her smile? Was it because of his eyes? But then again, these people smile and look at their own friends every single day without anything happening, without anyone falling head over heels with them (or so they think).
In short, these lead me to believe that there must be something more to encounters than mere chance. But as to what it is? I don't know. Should I deign to call it fate? I wouldn't be wrong in that respect either. But how can destiny and fortune, two totally antipodal concepts meet eye to eye?
The answer still escapes me.
All I can say though is that while we may never really figure out why these things happen, it is these seemingly transient and fortuitous encounters, these Marcellian mysteries, which make life both uniquivocally tragic and truly splendid.
*A note though: the coffee story is purely hypothetical :)
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