There are those moments in life when you turn left, not because you have been planning to, but because the pull of events are guiding and leading you to the place you need to be.
Last Sunday, we noticed our indoor/outdoor cat wasn't around. It was supposed to be a cold-ish night, not beyond anything I knew she hadn't survived already, but there was still some worry. By Tuesday afternoon, with still no sign of her, we completed all the tasks we knew to do: posting on the Humane Society website, going to see all the cats who had been found recently, calling her name endlessly...
By Thursday, we were beginning to resign ourselves to the possibilities. She'd been taken in by another family and was waiting for her chance to escape and return to us. She'd been taken in by another family and we'd never see her again. Or she'd been involved in some nefarious end (be that weather, a car, a larger, meaner animal, etc.).
During this week, I'd been reading The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho, which talks a lot about allowing yourself to be guided by omens and following your own Personal Treasure. So when my teenage step-daughter started talking about ideas that resonated with that concept, I was in a space to listen and offer some agreements. (Let's not get bogged down now in the family debates about responsibility and privileges that preceded her declaration that she was going to follow her heart and not worry about the details.) It was with the teenage need for freedom from parental figures that she went out for a long walk and phone conversation with one of her friends. And it was that long walk that took her voice along a particular stretch of road. And it was her voice (I believe) that prompted our cat to start her pitiful crying. And it was that distinctive crying that stopped my step-daughter and allowed her to find Bo, our kitty.
So the girl who had been talking early in the evening about following her heart to find happiness in life brought happiness into our home just a few hours later. So I ask, is there coincidence in this world? Or is that just another name for somehow listening to the currents of life and allowing them to guide us to the right place at the right time?
