Memoirs Of A Graduate

My most recent life’s philosophy is that everything happens for a reason. I didn’t used to think that way, I used to think life was a bitch and I was a particularly unlucky individual who suffered the brunt of it.


Then you hear stories. I heard one about a girl, she lived on a remote island in the Pacific somewhere, population 53 or something ridiculously small. She was out surfing one day with her friends as she often did, lying on her surfboard, using her arms hanging over the side to paddle, a shark suddenly came and bit her arm off. Her friends rushed her back to land; bleeding profusely she passed out in their arms assuming she would die. And she would have done. Such a small island lacked medical supplies to save her and different even have a surgeon. Except that on that day, the girl’s father had been scheduled to get knee surgery. A surgeon had flown out from the mainland, as well as supplies of blood, matched to the father’s blood type, and his daughters. She came in, took his place on the table and survived. Without a surgeon and the replacement blood, the exact type she would need, she would have died. Is this all just one massive coincidence? Or did everything happen for a reason.

I try and think about my life this way too. I met Jake nearly three years ago because we had mutual friends. Now if I hadn’t been friends with that group of girls, I would never have been introduced to Jake and his friends. However, Jake’s friend Karl lived in my block of flats last year. I hung out with his flatmates on quite a regular basis so I would have got to know Karl that way. Then no doubt at his birthday or even just on a night when he invited his friends down, I would have met Jake. People don’t just come into our lives out of sheer random coincidence. We meet the people we meet, and if doesn’t happen one way, it’ll happen another.

Have you ever made a new friend, then looked on their facebook or something and found out you’ve got mutual friends? Ever invited a random friend to a party only to find he/she knows someone else there.

Its things like that that make me believe life doesn’t just happen, things are meant to happen. I’m not saying we have no control because we do. I chose to be friends with that group of people. Had I not chose that, I wouldn’t have met Jake til later. No matter what road you take though, if something’s meant to happen then I think you’ll meet it on both paths, at some point or another.