So much of the life that I am living now is the result of 1,000 choices made by me and people in my life; often these choices were made long before I was born.
It's humbling to me thinking through the series of unintended consequences of my life.
Because work on the Prairies in the 1950s was sparse, my mother's family came to Prince George for work.My great aunt met her husband on the train to Prince George from Saskatchewan and fell in love, married and had four children.
My aunt set up her sister (my grandmother) with a friend of her husband's and they fell in love and married and had my mom.
My mom grew up and met a young man (my dad) whose family also ended up in Prince George after years of moving around British Columbia, and they fell in love and married and had my brother and I.
I grew up in Prince George and had a perfectly ordinary life.In university, I decided to enrol in the co-op program for "work in my field" and as an English/History major, that meant I got a job in Barkerville, where I met my future husband.
Because Russia invaded Hungary in 1956, my husband's mother and grandmother joined thousands of others in a mass exodus of their homeland and, due to a series of immigration policies, they ended up in Abbotsford and made a life for themselves.
My husband grew up in the Lower Mainland and had a friend who found a job for him at Island Mountain Arts in Wells and he spent the next few years coming up to Barkerville and Wells where he eventually met me.
A funny thing is that my husband almost didn't go to Barkerville the summer we met.At the last minute, he decided that he would go and I am grateful.
Had I skipped class the day my school was promoting the co-op program, I wouldn't have gone to Barkerville that year and I wouldn't have met my husband or had our children.
If Canada's immigration policy at the time wasn't as open as it was, then my mother-in-law may have ended up in a different country and I wouldn't have met my husband at all.
If you believe in fate, which I don't, then you may find comfort in the fact that people are made for each other and "if it's meant to be, it will happen."
There are no soul mates, just choices made that bring people in and out of each other's lives.
The chaos of the resulting choices is staggeringly random and beautiful.
