Coincidence.

I saw him again.
Those beady eyes, the dark visage, the gappy smile.
More accurately, he first saw me.
I was driving, with my head half hidden under a big blue Adidas baseball cap.
I heard someone shouting at me "HEY!" while I slowed to a stop sign. I turned my head towards the voice. It was him: my old friend from Giant Eagle.

(Please read my previous entry about my friend from Giant Eagle to understand the full picture.)

We all know that the world is quite small. There has been uncountable situations where I had ran into an old friend at some random street corner or grocery store whom I hadn't seen for years. Here, I saw my Giant Eagle friend again. As I drove away from the stop sign, he shouted the familiar "Mah FRIEND!!" Being in state of shock with his voice reverberating through my ears, I continued driving. What coincidence.

Definitions:
Coincidence: Alignment of two or more noteworthy events without obvious causal connection.
Chance: An opportunity or possibility. To find, as if by accident. A probability.
Fate: An event (or course of events) that will inevitably happen in the future.
Serendipity: Act of discovering something fortunate, especially when looking for something else entirely.

Such romantic words these are: coincidence, fate, destiny, serendipity... They are words that describe supernatural forces that tie seemingly random events or people together in this either multi-theistic or atheistic world. Mathematically, most occurrences happen randomly. Scientifically, events move towards entropy. Unless we are dealing with a strategic model that captures the success of an individual's choice based on others' choices or Nash equilibrium, we are just trying to make our lives more meaningful by attributing causality to random events.

Definitions:
Meaning: A symbolic value of something. Rich in significance or implication.
Significance: The extent to which something matters. Importance.

Value is a personal thing. If an event carries such a weight on a person's life, so much that it may impact the person for a lifetime, why not attribute meaning to it? After all, aren't we all living for a reason? Whatever the different reasons are, we are all moving towards being fortunate. Happy. Satisfied.

I personally think tremendously about … everything. It may be a waste of energy. My Myers-Briggs personality indicator even tells me so: that I may be wasting energy from thinking too much. However, I see myself as being a Game Player with playoffs being happiness points. If I can attribute meaning or reason to events that has happened in my life, I can at least learn from them and make one step towards getting what I want. I will never be able to get everything I want, nor will I know for certainty even what I want, but I would like the satisfaction of knowing that I played an active role in getting there. Where? Who knows. I'll leave that to chance ;-) And my Giant Eagle friend? He's symbolic of people who come and go in my life... and people that appear again.