Funny.

I just got home from my weekly ritual of getting my nails painted. (SIDENOTE: I would say overall I am a pretty low maintenance gal, I often leave the house with no make-up on and mismatching sweatpants, but my finger nails are the one thing I have to have perfect all the time or it makes me crazy. And only polish changes, I'm much too impatient for manicures. The funny thing is I really don't even like getting my nails done, but it looks like a 5-year old painted them if I do it myself, so I shell out the $6 a week plus tip so I don't look like I tended to my fingers after polishing off an entire bottle of wine. FIN) This wasn't for bringing that up...


If there is one place in Sammamish you can always count on running into someone you know, it's US Nails. (Or the Pine Lake QFC, but I'm there less often. That makes it sound like I'm nails > food, but there is one closer to my house.) Last time I was there, I saw someone that worked at my middle school. Today, I ran into a mom of someone I used to play soccer with. This woman literally watched me play soccer every Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday for all of high school. It's just funny.


The notion of running into people. If you really sit down and think about it (which most of you probably don't because you arent overthinkers like moi) what are the chances of running into that one person at that one single location at any given time of day? I mean, mathematically. The answer  is I am bad at math so I don't know what the probability is, but I am guessing it isn't that big. So it always strikes me as interesting when I run into someone, especially someone that was recently on my mind, as was the case with this woman. I was thinking about her and her family, she lost her husband about this time four years ago, and it just so happens that I was thinking about that the other day as I brushed my teeth. I just started to wonder how they were doing, how the kids were, about how everyone felt this time back then. It's funny when the answer to your wonderings is provided by a random run-in. 


Sometimes, it almost seems like it was meant to happen. I often think, because I believe in fate and religion and a higher power (but also, as I covered before, because I am an overthinker) that there are no such thing as coincidences, and that often when you run into someone, there was some reason that both of you decided you needed a caffeine fix and went to Starbucks at 3:17 PM on a Thursday. One thing I always think of when I talk about this is something that happened last year. One of my best friends was having an awful day, for reasons I can't even remember now, and I decided that the perfect remedy was sugar (nature's therapy) and a trip to the pumpkin patch. As we were walking through the rows of muddy & moldy pumpkins - I think it was around October 28th, we may have gotten there a bit late for the cream of the crop - I spotted a blonde-haired little boy and commented on how absolutely adorable he was. She started laughing when she realized that the boy was actually her nephew. We ended up running into her step-brother and his family, and the timing of that just struck me as poignant. Often when you are having a bad day, all you want is people that really know you, and thats what she got. Of course, her step-brother asked what in the heck we were doing at a pumpkin patch since we aren't parents and didn't have any little kids with us. Obviously he doesn't understand that growing up isn't necessarily a part of getting older...


Things like this, like much in life, just make me stop and think, and make me feel such a sense of community, both in my hometown and in the world as a whole. It's so much smaller than we give it credit for, and in a world full of 6 billion people, you are never that far away from someone that knows you. 


Pretty comforting isn't it?


♥mb.