A chance meeting...

I was tip toeing up a steep hill, which felt like walking on hot coals as the sun beat down on the tarmac surface, to the ‘Speed slide’ at Adventure World. A young boy about 10 years old walked past me and casually asked if I was going on the slide (a water slide that hurls you down at 41mph) and I told him less casually that I was and that this was my first time. His response was ‘I have been down this 10 times before’. Behind him followed his two sisters or girls he was responsible for, they must have been 6 and 8 years respectively. They went ahead of me and I watched as he organised the girls to go down the slide after him. It appeared that the youngest girl couldn’t swim as he said he would grab her out the water at the end of their slide! The boy then spoke with the others in the queue and organised who was going to accompany him down, because two slides ran parallel to each other. I watched him go and then afterwards he waited, watching the two girls throw themselves down and picking the youngest out of the water, just as he had said. This brief encounter with Aboriginal people reminded me of my Gypsy friends, their resourcefulness and courage to use what is around them for their benefit and the benefit of others. A chance meeting that I had been waiting for with the indigenous people of this land (I had been surprised that I had not spoken to one Aboriginal person in over two months) and one that I will remember.

It made me think that chance meetings can have a life changing effect and chance experiences can define a journey, they are random yet for me they have the feeling of being orchestrated. Something occurs that never crossed the mind previously or like a dream / desire that begins to form a reality, in the novel ‘The Power of One’ the author states:

Sometimes the slightest things change the direction of our lives, the merest breath of a circumstance, a random moment that connects like a meteorite striking the earth. Lives have swirled and changed direction on the strength of a chance remark (Bryce Courtenay, 1989)

Mark