Meth: a Ticking Timebomb Gone Viral

The Strange and Unexplained Coincidences in Life

Fate and destiny vs free will and our choices possibly changing outcomes is riveting stuff for me. I am more inclined to believe our fate is set...that destiny governs everything to do with our lives from before we are even born...but I could be wrong. Coincidence is another one that intrigues me. A small example of coincidence happened to me last week on one of my regular bike rides.

Bear in mind that I ride every day on the exact same course. I had been on the road for around ten minutes when I noticed a young girl who was about fifteen years old and dressed in a school uniform walking towards me on the opposite side of the road. On any other day, this would not have garnered a mention on my post, but on that particular day, as I casually glanced up from the handlebars and our eyes briefly met, she gave me the biggest smile and said hello. No big deal, right? I've had people in the past say hi to me as I passed them by, and this was just a friendly girl, who must have been having a good day and felt like expressing her happiness to the random stranger riding past her on his bike.

As you would expect, her friendly smile made me feel happy, and perhaps rather than coincidence, this happiness flowed on as I peddled along the next section of the circuit. In the distance, I saw another student, a boy around the same age as the girl, but wearing a different uniform, approaching on the other side of the road. And as we passed each other (you guessed it), he looked directly at me, smiled and said, "How ya goin, mate?" I replied with a nod and a smile and said, "Hey, mate." Very normal Aussie lingo, but not normal behaviour, especially from students, going by past experience.

I put it down to a case of schools all across the city having a 'say hello to a stranger riding a bicycle day'...a campaign that I was completely oblivious to until these two lovely kids shared that with me.

Then, not a minute later, I was riding past a building site. One of the workers was out the front on the footpath when he looked up, smiled and said Gidday.

I would have looked a little bewildered, but I gave him the obligatory nod and a 'Hey'. As I pressed on, I was beginning to think I had entered the twilight zone. Then, as I topped the hill on a lefthand bend (you wouldn't read about it) I slowly passed a guy who had obviously just arrived home from work (because of the fact he was still in his fluro uniform), was getting out of his car when he looked at me with a smile and said hi.

To put this into context, in the previous ten years of riding the same course, with only the occasional smile from others out and about and then to have four people say hello to me in a matter of ten minutes, is a coincidence I would love to happen every day.