The Children of Coincidence

Can we control our own destiny?

Is the fact that some of us have success in life, and some of us fail entirely at everything we try due to the former group being wise and prudent planners, and the latter group's reckless feckless behaviour?

Or is the fickle finger of fate prodding us into the directions we take?

This morning the good news that an Egyptian policeman caught a small child falling from a building made me wonder about the parents, were they in the feckless, reckless group? Somehow they have been spared the terrible consequences of whatever lack of parental control allowed the child to fall. I wonder too how other parents who weren't so lucky feel. Do they feel aggrieved that their child perished?

Was the hand of God sparing that child? Or was it just one of those lucky, right time, right place set of circumstances?

I've been lucky in life. Lived through situations such as, deciding which pub to go to in the evening when I lived in Birmingham, enjoying my night out and then hearing the IRA bomb blast in the pub we didn't visit. 

If my ship hadn't received a change of orders and been diverted from Lavera to Helsinki, we may not have suffered the damage we did in the North Sea. Then we wouldn't have been salvaged by the Hamburg tugs. Having an enforced stay in Hamburg for repairs created a situation where I had one of my biggest adventures. 

In the mid 1970s I one of my tutors advised me, immediately after I had passed all my accountancy exams that I would be better off forgetting accountancy. I was at a significant milestone towards achieving my goal. But he advised against as accountancy because it was a male dominated profession back then. He suggested I try IT, or Data Processing as it was more commonly called then. In IT in the mid 1970s women were accepted as equals, and he was sure that was where I should seek a career. I might never have thought of such a role for myself, but I took his advice, abandoned accountancy and entered a whole new world. It was terrific.

Throughout my life I've been faced with opportunities that changed my direction radically, and for the better. But am I'm fooling myself if I think there is some God given, hand of fate sort of reason to all this? 

Maybe it's all down to my own capacity to exercise discernment when faced with choices. My willingness to assess every opportunity offered to me, accept the good proposals and reject the others. I certainly accepted a good proposal when I married my husband, and previously I had rejected proposals from a few toads! 

However we look at our own lives, whether we believe in God, luck, or chance we must surely be generous in our compassion for those who seem to stumble through life making the wrong choices. Those who never develop the art of discernment, never learn to sift the good from the bad options, for they will always be wondering if they are God forsaken, or cursed. 

We are all The Children of Coincidence , but some have developed the life skills to make good choices when coincidence delivers a beneficial set of circumstances.

And in the case of the falling child neither the policeman nor the child had any influence over the outcome, but it was a good one.