Oddly Enough

This week, my mom is traveling out west. Tuesday night, she was sitting at a restaurant in West Yellowstone, Montana when her cousin walked in. Her cousin who lives in San Diego. He was traveling with his dad (her uncle) and they were staying next door.  If she’d been sitting in another part of the restaurant, she never would have seen him.

It begs the question, certainly: What are the odds?

Two years ago, my sister and I were sipping Amarula at Ras Nungwi,  a resort on the island of Zanzibar, off the coast of Tanzania.  One of us mentioned something about DC, and a woman two seats over perked up. It turned out that she lived two blocks away from us, over near H St. NE.

What are the odds?

I sat in that chair.

I already told you about a couple of recent, odd blog coincidences. My stats tell me about others–someone in my building reads this blog, for instance. I have no idea who they are, and they don’t know who I am, either, though for all we know we pass each other every day. Earlier, while flipping through some pictures that my sister’s childhood best friend posted on Facebook, I saw a comment from someone I follow on Twitter, a blogger I found randomly months ago.

Honestly now. What are the odds?

I RSVPed for an event recently, and when my confirmation came I saw that one of the presenters listed was Lieu’s dad. I didn’t even know he participated in that type of event. It’s just the kind of thing Lieu would attend, too.  That man loves his father. And ipso facto, it’s also just the kind of thing I would attend–though I didn’t, obviously.

But what if Lieu had never replied to my Craigslist ad two years ago? Or what if I hadn’t liked his initial email, or hadn’t seen it, or had been distracted by someone else? Might I have gone to his dad’s event, seen Lieu’s shy face at the reception, and wound up talking to him, and flirting, and making plans to meet? It’s not likely; I’m not the kind of woman who gets hit on at parties and he’s not the kind of man who chats people up. More probably, I would have skipped out on the cocktail hour, or he would have, and we might have passed that event sitting one row apart, never even noticing one another. All of the good times we had, lost to chance. All of that pain and wasted effort, erased.

What are the odds, really, of meeting the right person at the right time, in the right way, so that a space opens up between you where something big and beautiful can bloom?  And how do you improve those odds? Conventional wisdom dictates that you should just go about your business, be fully engaged in things you love, and it will happen.  You always meet someone when you least expect it. Maybe I have the wrong hobbies, but I tried that for a long, long time with no measurable result.  Well, “tried” it in that I didn’t try at all.  Not trying didn’t work, either.

So, if trying doesn’t work, and not trying doesn’t work, then the alternative is to…? Try not to try? Secretly try, but never let on? (Actually, I tried that too.  Unrequited love for people who don’t actually know I love them is my specialty; I went way out on a limb with Lieu, and we’ve seen how well that worked.)

Maybe the true alternative is to just stop needing it. Really, really stop. But what are the odds of that?