By Chance We Met

It was eleven years ago around this time when my destiny started to unveil. I was working at Johnson and Johnson and life was a tangled mess.
By chance, I discovered a KungFu class at work and quickly signed up. It was great, every session was therapy. I punched and kicked, ran and worked out like it was boot camp. The classes, which were twice a week was a place to unleash a lot of anxiety.


It was also from this class I met many employees from different departments that later became good friends. The group consisted of disciplined young single professional workaholics. Thus, I saw the perfect opportunity to make a dream come true, a campfire/ camping trip with a group of friends. Camping is a world of difference from a first class vacation, but there is something magical about sleeping in a tent outdoors. So I made the suggestion to our Kung Fu instructor and took lead to coordinate an event. The email invitations went out to our KungFu-ers with the option to invite others as they deemed appropriate.

By chance, SO wrote me (the coordinator) an email and asked if he could help, or bring something for the event. Since I did not recognize the name (thought "she" was in our class and would have received regular updates from the group), his email received no-reply. Little that I know, it was one of our chances that went unfulfilled.

By chance, I asked to borrow a pen from SO to sign up for a conference room close to his office at some point. SO and I worked in the same building, but we never saw or knew of each other. I do recall the incident, but also recalled that I didn't look at the person that handed me the pen. Had I looked at him, I might have been wakened sooner from the contentment of being in a miserable relationship. The relationship I was in at the time was turbulent with the most arrogant person, extremely jealous, huge egotistic and very demanding of others I had ever known. He might have changed now, but at the time he was very conceded. I watched him scold at people, and treated people as if they were second class. Even though I knew those were not good qualities, I thought it didn’t matter because he was worth it.

SO and I had chances to talk and officially engaged in eye contact before the campfire event, but both opportunities with the pen and the email went unclaimed. 

The camping day arrived and it was held at New Brighton Beach, in Santa Cruz, California. I came with a girlfriend who had no intention of staying over night. SO came with a friend that had a friend in the KungFu group, and they were big campers. We never saw each other until dinner time when all the guys came back from playing volleyball on the beach. SO and I sat opposite from the circle of fire.

Everyone had a blast even after SO made me jumped on top of the picnic table. Part of the night was written in Is Dating Like a Cattle Field?

I left camp early with my girlfriend while the others stayed. I was bummed, but maybe it was best that way. I can’t remember if SO loaned me his music collection before or after the incident. But I left camp that night with his entire case of music CDs and thinking I never knew anyone to be this trusting of a stranger. But SO trusted that he would by chance get his CDs back somehow.


Thanks for stopping by today.

Some other posts that I've written about how I met my SO: 
http://www.selfsagacity.com/2010/10/unfinished-business.html