"Lots of little chances for me, too," he began, thinking of the cat under the hornbeam trees. If he'd arrived there thirty seconds earlier or later, he would never have seen the cat, never have found the window, never have discovered Cittàgazze and Lyra; none of this would have happened.
That's an excerpt from the end of the Amber Spyglass, the third and final novel in Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials series that I thought I'd read as a kid but actually never completed until today. It got me thinking about those happy coincidences, those minuscule chances that seep into our lives and - much like a pebble changing the flow of a river - shift the course of our entire future.
My main example of this was the time I stood in a spot in the hall during the society fair at Newcastle University, despite knowing that I had signed up for all the groups that I wanted to join, and someone asked me if I wanted to volunteer with refugees and asylum seekers.
Had I not decided to look at my phone to see if there were more societies I wanted to join, then that person - who I now know to be Kezia - would not have had the opportunity to ask me that fateful question. That question changed the following five years of my life and will doubtless continue to change my life.
And it was more than just that moment of procrastination that led me to that particular spot in the hall. In my head, the sequence of events that led me there began at 17 when my girlfriend of two years broke up with me. It was an incredibly painful experience, but as you will see in this post, it turned out to also be a catalyst for a lot of the wonderful things in my life.
When I turned 18 and got a job at my local pub, I was offered shifts on a Thursday, the night that my ex and I had previously always met up. This meant that I was able to turn what had previously been a lonely night into an evening of earning money and meeting new people.
A short time after starting that job, my friend Mark mentioned that he was thinking about working on the National Citizen Service (NCS) and so - with the confidence I gained from my experience working behind the bar and having been on NCS as a participant - I applied.
Around this time, my two closest friends at the time and I decided to go on a gap year together. This was something that I never would have done in my past relationship: I had wanted to join her at Exeter university as fast as I could and so I had been completely prepared to sacrifice the opportunity to go travelling.
During the planning of this gap year, my dad helped me to (made me) realise that I wouldn't want to make my gap year about just me, so I decided to look at overseas volunteering opportunities. After a couple of days of hunting, I came across the three-month long International Citizen Service. By this point I'd been accepted on the NCS and I thought that it would be pretty cool to have both the National and International Citizen Services on my CV, so I applied for it.
I ended up being successful and was placed in Tanzania. During the cycle, there was a little bit of cultural tension between the UK and Tanzanian volunteers, but eventually this was resolved. Looking back, it was a fortuitous learning experience.
When I returned from TZ, I re-sat some of my A-Levels, having previously failed to get into Leeds. I used these resits as an opportunity to reassess what uni was best for me and so I ended up changing my first choice to Newcastle.
Following my resits (which a while later I found out were successful), I was off to Vietnam to catch-up with my mates that were already travelling. A few weeks into the trip, we left on our motorbikes in the morning to get petrol, but the first station wasn't working and so we had to find somewhere else.
We all fuelled up and the boys in the group (we'd met some people whilst travelling) went ahead, whilst I stayed behind with the girls as they filled up their water bottles. Once that was done, I left first and about 30 seconds later was lying on the road with a gaping wound along my right knee and thigh, having been in a crash with a truck.
Not being fond of dying, I somehow escaped with just a flesh wound. After surgery and some time in a Vietnamese hospital, I made it back to the UK for the recovery 'leg'. In the 10 weeks between my crash and going to uni, I came across an advert on YouTube. Google, in conjunction with the UNHCR, shared images of what life was like in Syria before the war and contrasted it with the devastation that followed.
When I looked at the news about Syria, I now no longer saw a war-torn country, I saw people not so dissimilar to myself that were petrified and in need of help. I said to myself in that moment that I needed to do more than just donate to support refugees. That being said, I didn't try particularly hard to follow through on that promise to myself.
Regardless, a few weeks later, I found myself standing on that spot in the hall where Kezia asked me if I wanted to support refugees and asylum seekers. I stood there as someone with experience of cross-cultural communication, time available because I was physically unable to do rugby yet, and motivation from seeing that advert. I took a moment to consider the idea and then put my name down on the register to volunteer.
Two months later, I went to my first session at N.E.S.T, an organisation that turned out to only exist at Newcastle University. I mean really, what are the chances?
I'd love to know of your similar stories - please share them in the comments below!
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