Sliding Doors

“When you look back on your life, it looks as though there were a plot, but when you are into it, it’s a mess: just one surprise after another. Then later you see it was perfect.
Arnold Schopenhauer

I’ve thought about this quote a lot in my life. My life feels like a chaotic mess about 90 percent of the time. And yet, often when I look back on other messy periods of my life, I realize I emerged from these experiences a much wiser man.

The first truly astounding “coincidence” in my life occurred when I was 24 years old and road tripping across the western United States to work in Glacier National Park for the summer. It was a glorious time in my life. I had a Volkswagen bus filled with so much beer I could barely fit my luggage in there. I brought along dozens of books to read for the summer. I was young, I was single, and I was free.

So I took my time getting out to Montana that summer, stopping every hundred miles or so to camp, to drink, to meet the locals in little towns, and really just relax. At one point I pulled into a little KOA campground in Idaho and set up shop for the night. I began icing down my beer when I noticed a young couple doing the same in the campground across the way.

As was my custom, I walked over to them and invited them to come by later and hang out and drink some beer. They were a couple of years younger than me and were traveling across the United States for the first time. They were a little lost as to where they were going, and accepted my offer to come and hang out with great enthusiasm. The offer of free beer of course didn’t hurt..

So we talked well into the night. I gave them some advice on places to go, and they told me about their lives back home in Kentucky. We talked about books, philosophy, sports, beer, and everything else people in their 20’s talk about as we watched the sun come up as the fire slowly dwindled. Eventually they returned to their campsite and I fell into a very deep and contented sleep.

When I woke up they were gone, apparently eager to hit the road and check out some of the places we had talked about. I envied them, seeing this beautiful part of the country for the first time. At 24 I felt old, not knowing that I was in fact in one of the most wonderful and adventurous periods of my life.

I had the most glorious, wild, reckless, amazing, summer of my life that year. From the little bars in strange corners of the state, to the Calgary Stampede, to road trips, and hiking and drinking, it was a summer I would never forget, and yes I even fell in love. I met a Southern Belle, and cut to two years later I moved down south to be closer to her.

I never pictured myself living in the South, but I actually adapted pretty quickly. I was working as a bartender and trying to figure out my next move in life as I continued to get a little older. Although I loved traveling and adventure and being free, I was starting to think that maybe it was time to get a little better plan together as to what I actually wanted to do with my life.

So one day I was at a party at my girlfriend’s house when I felt a tap on my shoulder. I didn’t know to many people there at the time, so when the kid asked me, “Is your name Joe?” I was definitely a little surprised.

It turns out it was the kid from the campground who I certainly thought I would never see again. Certainly this was a small world kind of moment and kind of an amazing coincidence, but simply seeing him again was not the end of the story.

“This may sound weird man, but I want to tell you something that’s pretty important,” he went on. “Talking with you that night and hearing how passionate you were about all of these books you’ve read really sparked something. I guess what I wanted to tell you was, I decided to become a teacher because of that night and that conversation that we had.”

And I was blown away!! Here I hadn’t even scratched the surface on my own career and I was altering people’s lives with a one-night conversation. I can still remember that conversation as if it was yesterday. It was the first taste I really had that people paid any attention at all to the things I had to say. I always felt a little like an imposter, dispensing advice, discussing literature, and pontificating, when at the time I didn’t even have a college degree.

And looking back all of these years later, I realized that conversation did in fact send me on a long road to becoming a kind of teacher. I’m a therapist now and a writer, and while I’m still not totally convinced anyone really listens to what I say, I do know how much power even one small conversation can potentially have. In this particular story I met this man twice, but somehow we had improbably each altered one another’s destiny in a profound and powerful way. It still amazes me really.