I came to know this most wonderful man while I was studying to become a ESOL teacher (and no, I’m not referring to myself -  although my study has led me to know myself a quite a bit better). This guy’s name is Scott and he is one of those genuine people who seem to exude only love, compassion and goodwill. What a pleasure, what a gift it is for me to have met Scott. He lifts me up every time I am with him.  Every time we meet I am astounded all over again by his way of being.

 

We all had to give a couple of  ’micro-teach’ lessons (this is a 15 minute teaching activity that we present to our classmates) during the course. During Scott’s last microteach he chose to facilitate a discussion about ‘chance’, about how our lives are very much determined by chance, or what seems like chance. Things like taking the earlier bus and just happening to come across an old friend who we haven’t seen for years when we disembark. An old friend who just happens to mention in passing that he has been reading a book that we then see in a second-hand bookstore the following day. When we buy the book we discover unexpectedly that it has the very information in it we have been seeking for the essay we are writing, due the next day.  That sort of thing -  chance…

 

…or not. Scott’s teaching got me thinking about synchronicity – something I have written about before (see sweet caroline… ). 

 

And it reminded me of a presentation I gave to my classmates a few months ago now – a presentation which started with a piece of graffiti that read ‘your life is chance not choice’ and ended with that graffiti rewritten as ‘your life is choice not chance’. Well it’s both, and that’s where synchronicity comes in.

 

Synchronicity is a big word for the collision of chance and choice. It is a collision we all create simply by being here. We exist in a world of randomness, a world of chance. And thoughout our lives we make choices about which bits of this randomness we will collide with. Often, particularly as we age, we come to understand many of these collisions as being caused by the conscious decisions we make. And we tend to relegate all others, those that seem to us to be not of our doing, as coincidence, chance, luck.

 

Yet perhaps this is a false dichotomy. Perhaps we are present in all the collisions of our live, whether we are conscious of it or not. And the sooner we realise this, and the sooner we take responsibilty for this, the sooner we can have our strawberry ice-cream.

 

 

 

So thanks Scott. Thanks for being who you are. Thanks for being in my life right now – I appreciate it, I appreciate you immensely.

 

x bhavatu sabbe mangalum x

 

Tags: friends and me, synchronicity, tesol

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 9th, 2010 at 4:49 pm and is filed under [5] be responsible, [7] be grateful, family, friends and me. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.