Signs, Serendipity and Kismet

I totally believe in signs, and my route to Newcastle has had 100s of them. Just today I found out my boss is going to cancel our health insurance as of August... which just happens to be when I'm leaving for the UK. Every day it seems to be something else pointing me towards Newcastle.

How about you? Have you had any signs that pointed you to where you are today? Any serendipity? Kismet? Stories, please!

Actually, I didn't think so when I first read this, but...

Vincent and I met in a Friends (the show) chatroom, the official one on the Friends site. We had spoken a few times and had some fun coversations, so we ended up exchanging Yahoo screennames one day. The next time I tried to log into the chatroom it was gone! Gone forever! How lucky...

9 years later, we're married and I'm off to live with him a week from friday. Life is funny sometimes.

I definitely believe in following signs.  I've given up trying to make things happen, I find that if I let go and allow my life to plot its own course then things work out.  If I try to force something, it ends in disaster.  There are plenty of examples of this, from the series of coincidences and fortune that got me into graduate school, to my disastrous attempts to change careers.  But the most striking chain of events is likely the one that led me here. 

I am here in the UK because of my husband.  I met my husband in Japan.  I almost didn't go to Japan.  I had never in my life thought about going to Japan.  However, I was at a point in my life where I was unhappy with my job, I had just ended a really bad relationship, I was bored and my heart was bruised so I wanted to get away.  I started looking for teaching jobs, because I had taught before and enjoyed it.  I found an ad for a recruiting session in San Diego for people looking to teach English in Japan.  I thought, ah, Japan, that's about as far away from Cali as you can get and still be on Earth.  But the session was scheduled for the day after I found the ad, so there wasn't time for me to make an appointment.  So I looked at the recruiting company's website, and found out that their main offices were in San Francisco.  As it happened, I was already going to San Francisco the following week.  I called the company, and they happened to have an appointment on the one day I was going to have some free time in SF.  So I went to the interview, got recruited, moved to Japan, met DH, and now here I am.  It was a big change, but everything just fell into place so naturally without me having to make any effort, that I knew it was how things were supposed to be.   

Oh I love this topic!  I have a few for sure. 

I was born in Oxford, MS, and now I live in Oxford, England. 

I met my husband when we were booked on the same flight from London to the US.  I was flying home from a holiday visiting my good friends here in England, he was flying to my hometown to meet up with his mum and stepdad who were already there on holiday visiting family because DH's stepdad is originally from the same city that I am from.

The first time I met DH's 'American family', I went to his uncle's house which is on the opposite side of the city from where I lived.  It's not a part of town that I was very familiar with, or a place I would have normally gone.  But when I was there, I had this overwhelming sense that I had been there before.  I couldn't figure it out, so I just wrote it off.  Then last autumn before my wedding, I went to lunch with my uncle's ex-wife.  She was my auntie when I was a little girl and we have kept in touch over the years......and we realised that DH's uncle's house was right across the street from where she and my uncle lived in the late 70's when I was small.  And I was never in the area again until I was there with my husband all those years later!

I definitely believe in fate.

Just today I found out my boss is going to cancel our health insurance as of August...

How terrible for your colleagues...

No, because I believe in none of it. 

I know that I have inherited a tendency towards the empathic medium from my father's side of the family, but I take that as a it comes and do nothing to develop it; it just seems to become more accute with age, maybe all the more so because I do not cultivate it but I do not stop it, either.  So things will know that I am there.

Some things I can feel and just know. 

Like for a while I have been seeing a house for let.  And from first I saw it, I knew that what is for you will not pass you, and so I knew this might be our next place to live and was mellow about it.

I'm going to see it tomorrow and if it is good we will apply for it, if not then on to the next.

Wasn't meant to be.

I have felt even more strongly about another place, in Edinburgh, but it was not meant to be, at least not yet.

Sometimes I think that fate has a hand in the way our lives turn out, but then I think that if we didn't make the decisions we make our lives would turn out differently, though not necessarily better or worse, just different.

If I hadn't been crap at German GCSE I wouldn't have taken extra lessons, my tutor wouldn't have convinced me to go to the open day for the school he taught at, I wouldn't have gone to that school for sixth form and become friends with Wiggy, and and 13 years later Wiggy wouldn't have introduced me to the man I am about to marry.

So, what made this happen?  Fate?  Destiny?  Or just a sequence of unrelated events which have combined to result in one of several billion possible conclusions?  I think it is more to do with quantum physics.

Vicky

I dunno if it's fate or destiny, but I did have something rather morbid happen to me that has subsequently cured me of ever lamenting the "what if"s.

(This is 100% true, btw.)

When I was about two months away from graduating college, I was interviewing for jobs full steam ahead. And there was one company I particularly wanted to work for. I had two friends who'd done internships there and I liked the people I'd met while interviewing and the work (and pay!) seemed good. I made it through two rounds of interviews and was down to three candidates with one getting hired and was looking hopeful, but I must have not had my wheaties on the day of the interview with the IT director or something cause I ended up seriously tanking it.

In the end they planned to hire one of the three, and hired two, but not me. Three weeks later I got a job with Citigroup for about 18% less money. Also, I didn't like the people as much.

I started my job in mid-July, 2001, I think. The company I didn't get the job with was called eSpeed. It was a subsidiary of Cantor Fitzgerald.

Dumb luck, eh? I seriously thought about tattooing "'What might have been?' is the dumbest question you can ask!" on my body somewhere but couldn't find a place.

P.S. One of the guys offered a job decided to continue to grad school instead and passed on the offer. I found out cause I ran into him on the train maybe two years later. 

I dunno if it's fate or destiny, but I did have something rather morbid happen to me that has subsequently cured me of ever lamenting the "what if"s.

(This is 100% true, btw.)

When I was about two months away from graduating college, I was interviewing for jobs full steam ahead. And there was one company I particularly wanted to work for. I had two friends who'd done internships there and I liked the people I'd met while interviewing and the work (and pay!) seemed good. I made it through two rounds of interviews and was down to three candidates with one getting hired and was looking hopeful, but I must have not had my wheaties on the day of the interview with the IT director or something cause I ended up seriously tanking it.

In the end they planned to hire one of the three, and hired two, but not me. Three weeks later I got a job with Citigroup for about 18% less money. Also, I didn't like the people as much.

I started my job in mid-July, 2001, I think. The company I didn't get the job with was called eSpeed. It was a subsidiary of Cantor Fitzgerald.

Dumb luck, eh? I seriously thought about tattooing "'What might have been?' is the dumbest question you can ask!" on my body somewhere but couldn't find a place.

P.S. One of the guys offered a job decided to continue to grad school instead and passed on the offer. I found out cause I ran into him on the train maybe two years later. 

Oh wow, Mort. . . .

Human beings are pattern finding machines. It's what we do. It's what we are. We look up in the night sky with the trillions of random stars and we see gods and bunnies and farm equipment.

It isn't there. We put it there. If you didn't take the road you took, you'd've taken another one and thought it meant something, too.

There have been so many. Even his Mum has told me she thinks it's fate.

I started my job in mid-July, 2001, I think. The company I didn't get the job with was called eSpeed. It was a subsidiary of Cantor Fitzgerald.

Kathleen 'Kit' Faragher, RIP, was not meant to attend a conferece at Cantor Fiztgerald on 11 September 2001.

A colleague on the trading floor who'd been hired from there a few months previously was supposed to go.

He broke his leg, and Kit, the fun-loving person she was, offered to go in his place. 

She loved to travel to NYC, or anywhere.

When she got in in the morning she used her new company Blackberry to email an old friend and lover of mine, Jason Phillips, who was in the tower next temping for another firm, to say she was in town.  He emailed her back to nail down dinner plans.


This is Kit how those who loved her best knew her:
http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2001/memorial/people/3845.html

Yes, definitely. So many reasons and examples! And like expat, I usually just have a feeling. Good and bad, they just always work out.

Human beings are pattern finding machines. It's what we do. It's what we are. We look up in the night sky with the trillions of random stars and we see gods and bunnies and farm equipment.

It isn't there. We put it there. If you didn't take the road you took, you'd've taken another one and thought it meant something, too.

This.

Brilliantly said!

I dunno if it's fate or destiny, but I did have something rather morbid happen to me that has subsequently cured me of ever lamenting the "what if"s.

(This is 100% true, btw.)

When I was about two months away from graduating college, I was interviewing for jobs full steam ahead. And there was one company I particularly wanted to work for. I had two friends who'd done internships there and I liked the people I'd met while interviewing and the work (and pay!) seemed good. I made it through two rounds of interviews and was down to three candidates with one getting hired and was looking hopeful, but I must have not had my wheaties on the day of the interview with the IT director or something cause I ended up seriously tanking it.

In the end they planned to hire one of the three, and hired two, but not me. Three weeks later I got a job with Citigroup for about 18% less money. Also, I didn't like the people as much.

I started my job in mid-July, 2001, I think. The company I didn't get the job with was called eSpeed. It was a subsidiary of Cantor Fitzgerald.

Dumb luck, eh? I seriously thought about tattooing "'What might have been?' is the dumbest question you can ask!" on my body somewhere but couldn't find a place.

P.S. One of the guys offered a job decided to continue to grad school instead and passed on the offer. I found out cause I ran into him on the train maybe two years later. 

Oh...wow...
I just want to give you a hug now!

I just don't believe in signs or fate or destiny, I make my own way in the world. Sometimes  I think fate is something that lots of people use to confirm a decision they've made, or as a band-aid when things go wrong "oh it's meant to be" "we just weren't fated to be together" "everything has a meaning..." and that's just not my style, however if it is yours, then good for you, "whatever get's you through the day".

For me, life can be tough and hard but is ultimately amazing and wonderful, you make the decisions you make and you have to live with them for the good and the bad, love to me is not fate, or destiny it's compassion, understanding, and hard work. 

I just can't chain events together, like this  one -
If I hadn't of got a brain tumour, I wouldn't have got a free computer from my uni, and I wouldn't have been online so much, so I wouldn't have met my boy.

That's a ridiculous chain of events, and not at all connected, but it could be if I chose to see it that way  You can link anything if you try.

I think people do themselves a disservice when they talk about fate, your significant other loves you because of who you are, how funny, sweet, kind, ball busting, independent, quiet, loud, clever you are, not because of any pre ordained plan.

Just my opinion.

My ex-boyfriend's uncle worked in the World Trade Center, but missed his train from New Jersey that morning and was running far later than usual, the attack happened just before he arrived, so he turned around and headed back toward home.
But, he died less than a year later from a stroke, days before his daughter's wedding.

I guess if things are meant to be, then they happen, sometimes regardless of what you choose. But, it's easy to look back over a series of choices that led to a present moment and wonder if you had changed one of them, what would've happened then?