It seems that I have inherited my father's strange timing. Mostly when it comes to other people though. He has this ability to draw people to him. For instance the street he lives on could be nearly empty. Traffic has been light all day. Then he gets in the car and goes for a drive and what does he find? A tractor going 15 mph and ten cars trailing it, meaning he's now stuck in traffic that didn't exist until he went for a drive. I can do the same thing now. I'll be wandering through a store in the evening. There aren't a lot of people there. I go down an aisle to look at something and within seconds not one, but several people will arrive in the same exact location and stand inches away from me, in what was once an empty spot on the planet. The thing is though that these people may be thinking the same thing about me.
The whole idea got me wondering about all the strange bits of timing that we run into where it feels like the world is conspiring against us or no matter where we go there is resistance. Then I started to think, what about all the stuff that we miss? You're driving along a narrow road and there is something just slightly in your lane that you try to avoid and at that exact moment there is a car coming from the opposite direction. You hadn't seen a car for the last twenty minutes and don't see another on the road after that, but at that precise moment your timing brought you to this meeting. How many things are we missing? Those instances where we're clued in on what's going on around us makes it seem like a cruel twist of fate that you can't go anywhere without drawing traffic to you. What if though we're silently and unknowingly avoiding things that are potentially much worse...or much better? Afterwards we tend to say to ourselves 'If only I had...' in some attempt to rationalize that if our actions had only been slightly different, we could have changed the outcome. Maybe if I hadn't stopped for that extra minute then I would have been in the intersection when the truck ran the red light. What's to say though that in changing that single action on your part everything else would remain the same? The truth is that our actions are such a small part of a greater chaotic system.
Still we tend to be the center of our own universe and we tend to think that our actions matter. That we brought ourselves to this moment and weren't carried here by unseen forces of a chance. Maybe these little moments in time where we run into, or almost run into, something that feels like a world working against us, we're actually peeking behind the curtain a bit to see just how random everything is. Sure you tried to make a quick trip to the grocery store and managed to leave at the exact time when the power goes out in your neighborhood. It could feel like you have the worst timing. Then think about all the times you read about how something happened and you were nowhere near it, but close enough to think you could have been. Those are just the things that we're aware of going on around us. When those weird things happen it may be helpful to think about all the random stuff that we sailed through without problem.
