Fumbling Towards Destiny (w/ apologies to Sarah McLachlan)

I'm about to get a little Carrie Bradshaw on you, be prepared.

Do things happen for a reason?

Ha ha ha, sorry, I watched three episodes of "Sex & The City" yesterday and just couldn't help myself.

But seriously, take a recent example:

I was in the worst mood yesterday. Lots of factors, none of them particularly justified. I was just pissed off. But I picked myself up and went out to dinner with a bunch of my friends at Lincoln Road. Drive over was incident free, found parking easily. Then on the walk over to the restaurant I got a phone call from a friend who was freaking out in the most irritating (and unfortunately, frequently common way). Just as I hung up with him, and took a couple deep breaths to get my blood pressure back down, I saw a guy carrying an albino python (literally my worst nightmare because I'm scared to death of snakes). A block later, the heel of my favorite pair of sandals broke off (I bought them at Century 21 in New York in my poor paralegal days). And they can't even be fixed because it would involve a soldering iron at the very least. But moving on, five of us made it to dinner on time, three more joined us later and dinner took three hours.

I decided to forego bar-hopping with the group and went for ice cream instead (better allocation of calories, I reasoned) with my friend A, one of the dinner attendees. Now we are getting to the point of the post -- we sat and ate our ice cream and chatted and I told her about a guy my newly married friends (and perennial matchmakers) wanted to fix up with me. We giggled about that for a few minutes and then literally ten minutes later, he walks by with his brother, brother's girlfriend, and his dog. We chatted for a while, nothing exciting, but I couldn't help but wonder -- if I hadn't endured an abusive phone call, a run-in with a terrifying beast, and losing my slipper (ok sandal, I'm romanticizing. Whatever.) then would I have run into him?

Put differently: did destiny make my phone ring, throw a snake in my path, and break my shoe so that I would run into him at the end of the night? To me, for all these trials to occur in one night is of almost mythic significance -- call me Odyssea. Is it of cosmic significance, or more likely that a ton of people walk around Lincoln Road on Saturday nights?

I'm a big believer in fate, and think coincidence is just part of fate. And there are any number of people I could have run into last night but didn't. So maybe the set-up is fated. Guess I'll just have to wait and see.