The Hidden Reason, The Unknown Why.

Roland and I were sitting at his dining table one late evening. He had pulled a a very nice bottle of chianti,[Ruffino, I think,] from his wine rack. Sinath, his lovely wife, had put their kids to sleep and had gone to bed herself.

He brought two bordeaux glasses to the table and handed me the corkscrew. I pulled the cork out of the bottle, smelled the cork [lovely aroma!] and poured wine into his glass and then into mine.

I swirled the wine in my glass. "Roland, do you realize that we can never know the real reason we find ourselves in a particular place and time," I said to him.

He took a sip of his wine and looked at me. "Aren't we there because we made the decision to be there, for some particular reason."

"That is true enough. But that is not the aspect of our being at a particular place at a particular point in our life that I am talking about. What I mean is that even though we made the decision to be there, something...." I searched for the right word to use, "something, well... cosmic is going on."

Roland sipped on his wine and frankly looked a little doubtful about the cosmic part.

"Look, Roland, you told me that Sinath stopped by your desk at work, when you first met. And one thing led to another. And now you are married and have two beautiful daughters and a truly beautiful life. What if you hadn't had that job? You would have never met Sinath. And your life would have turned out very different than it has."

Roland responded, "Let me see if I am understanding your point. You went back to college in your mid 50's. Right? You came back to get your college degree. That was why you thought you were there."

I nodded my head in agreement.

He continued, "But you never did finish and you didn't graduate, as you planned to do. But you did meet me and Winston and Maria. So are you saying that the real reason you were there was that you were destined to meet the three of us? That there was some cosmic force in the mix?"

I answered, "Something like that."

He continued, "Maybe, it is just a matter of random probablility. You will encounter certain people if you choose one path or a different set of people of you take another. Or maybe we would have met anyway. Or maybe this was just a fortunate coincidence that we had the same math class together."

I considered that possibility and said, "I don't know. You could be absolutely right. It could just be a random event."

I continued, "However, it just seems to me that somehow in the cosmic scheme of things, we somehow meet the people that we are going to need to help us get through our lives successfully. These pivotal people seem to enter our lives at exactly the moment we need them to be there. And that is not something that we could ever plan or reasonably expect to happen. Somehow, it just does."

Roland countered, "Not for everyone. For some people it doesn't happen."

"I know. And when it doesn't, I feel badly for those people for whom it doesn't happen. But it happened for you and for me. How do explain why things worked out for us?"

He thought about my question. " A lot of working hard and keeping focused. And maybe a bit of dumb luck. And perhaps a bit of divine intervention. I can't tell you exactly why. You know what I think? I don't believe that we can really ever know for sure why our lives have turned out as they have. I don't know the reason why our paths crossed and why we were destined to become great friends." He paused for a moment and smiled. "I am just profoundly grateful that we have become such good friends."

I raised my glass. "My thoughts exactly. And, my good friend, no matter how it comes our way, I will take my good fortune any way I can get it."

Roland raised his glass and we clinked glasses. "That, sir, is a good thought. Let's drink to that."