“If you believe in fate, you are not lost… you are exactly where you are supposed to be at any given moment.” – Jeremy Farrance

I’m pretty sure I don’t believe in “fate” actually. But I do believe that sometimes we end up in a place for a reason that we did not expect – and it is often times a very good thing.   Case in point  when I graduated from college/nursing school the LAST HOSPITAL ON MY LIST place I least likely desired to find employment was Norwalk Hospital where my sister was a nurse.  I had followed her lead it seemed all my life – from school being two years younger to Bridgeport Hospital as a nurses-aide and to Fairfield University School of Nursing, and I was quite frankly ready to make my own name and not be Ginny’s little sister.    Well, after too many interviews and applications in the year of too many nurses for hire to hospitals from Greenwich to New Haven I got my only job offer at of course Norwalk Hospital.   Needing a job and moneyNot wanting to delay taking care of people any longer I took the job and met one month later a nurse named Barbara who would eventually fix me up on a blind date with Skip and it was love at first sight – ok – that’s a story for another blog.  But needless to say – if it was not for taking the job at Norwalk and meeting Barbara who was engaged to Mark who had met Skip in kindergarten in New Jersey and their families were lifelong friends, I would not have met Skip and had the life experiences, met the people I have known,  had my children… well it goes on from there.

He made me an offer I could not refuse

It comes down to making choices hopefully we make more good choices than bad choices along the way.  We choose to study or not to study for those SAT’s (the people who sell papers in the middle of the street may have not always made good choices)  which gives us the opportunity to have more choices as to where we will go to college or not and effects without us even thinking about it at the time – the people we will know for our whole lives-who will be there when we need them most, the ones who will hurt us and impact our future choices and so on.   So its a little bit like Robert Frost telling us about that day in the woods he made a choice to take the road that had not been traveled as well.  And he was happy with his choice.  But in order to get there he had to put on his shoes and jacket – and maybe keep in shape so he could go for that walk or travel to the place where the diverging road was.   I prefer to think it was not just some metaphorical road- but an actual road- like our actual experiences and our actual choices in our lives we live.  When I look back I am extremely happy, quite joyous – that I made the decision to go to nursing school, that I made the choice to apply and take the offer at Norwalk Hospital, that I said yes to the blind date and that I took the road I did not expect to take along the way that blessed me with a wonderful family, wonderful friends, and of course the opportunity to make wonderful memories.

Yes, I am exactly where I was meant to be.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Robert Frost