Letters from NYC

Coincidences

A long time ago, one of my friends said to me that coincidences was God’s way of working in our lives quietly, so we could focus on the lessons. I was young and moving faster than the speed of light so I didn’t quite get their meaning but thought the concept quaint. He always pointed out the way we met and how our friendship and our experience with cancer had bolstered the other in ways that no one else could have done in our lives. When I finally began to pay attention to this I realized that every person coming into my life did so for a reason and with a purpose. I’ve since learned it’s usually for us to help each other with this thing called life.

The week before my last living friend, Betsey, died of cancer, she said to me: “who would have thought that a prominent therapist like me would gain such insights and receive such strength from a friendship I never even anticipated.” I never truly understood the loving thought behind what she was trying to say. Mostly, because I was upset over her prognosis, but I now realize that it also had to do with my experience. I didn’t quite understand her meaning because until then Mike and I were the ones with the strongest inner spirit. Yes, there were storms in my life, but they were easily weathered knowing I had incredible friends as my support and anchors, who helped tweak my sails just so each time, enabling me to stay on course.

With their deaths I’ve had to rely on my memories and guidance from the great beyond. That didn’t always work so well. Recently, I’m finding more and more that in your telling of your lives on your blogs, and in my reading of your funny, sweet, tender and often interesting revelations, I find similarities, differences and lessons that I have yet to learn.

Unbeknownst to one blogger, our email exchanges from this past week has helped me enormously in learning something about my life and myself that I otherwise would not have been able to learn. It wasn’t the fact they were holding a virtual mirror to my face, it was the fact that their sharing helped me understand my life and events within it in ways no therapist could have explained that I would have understood because it was out of my frame of reference or understanding. What's even more amazing is realizing that God is helping me with life in the only form I can manage right now - online.

And so tonight, the ripples in the pond have managed to reach me and Betsey, with a simple stone cast by words in a digital medium that is often dismissed as inconsequential. As a result, I am ever more grateful for such inconsequential coincidences, because I now know they’ll all have a more concrete meaning tomorrow.

Posted by Michele at October 2, 2006 11:47 PM | TrackBack