Thanks to all of you who have already commented on "What I've Learned Along the Way," Part One. I hope you will continue to comment and that those of you who haven't will do so. This is a subject in which no one's opinion is set in stone. Even the so called experts disagree vehemently. But in my mind those of us who have lived gay or bisexual lives are more likely to grasp bits and pieces of the truth than are the experts.
Those of us who can take the bits and pieces of truth we possess and apply them thoughtfully and realistically to the homosexual and bisexual communities at large can shed a great deal of light on the overall cultural characteristics of the still evolving homosexual and bisexual communities. And because we are all a part of these evolving communities in one way or the other, each of us has an obligation to share our thoughts and feelings.
Anyone who has read my blog for anytime at all knows I believe in destiny. I believe life has a purpose for all of us, and I believe to the extent we are on track to fulfill our purpose in life and our destiny to be a prime contributor to our overall sense of self-worth and happiness.
I gave up on believing in coincidence long ago. It was not something I chose to do. It became
something I was compelled to do, for if coincidence is real, my life has been an almost never ending string of fortuitous coincidences. That is just not possible. It would be the same as going to Vegas and winning every hand one played for years. It's not possible.
Behind everything we might want to see as coincidence, there has to be a guiding power. Otherwise, my life has defied impossible odds. Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not some male version of Mother Theresa. I'm no saint! I've had my share of adversities, wrong turns and doubts. But, along the way, I've had way more than my share of instances of seeming coincidence that simply had to be much more than mere serendipity.
Such a thing has taken place in just the last month. I made up my mind to write this article 6 to 8 weeks ago. My illness and subsequent confinement to an Intensive Care Unit gave me a great deal of time to think about the self-assigned task. I didn't tell anyone about it. I just thought about it. But the most amazing things began to happen. An old friend whom I had not heard from in a long while phoned me he other day. And what did he want to talk about? He wanted to talk about this article. He didn't even know I was writing about it, but he was facing issues in his own life that was leading him to some of the same conclusions I was planning to address in this article. It would have been unnerving had such a thing not long ago become ordinary in my life.
In addition to that call, my young friend here in Houston who had inspired this article over the last three years of our relationship, suddenly wanted to talk about the issue in detail as he was experiencing it in his own life. There were, out of the blue, several other seemingly coincidental incidents which contributed to this article. Every where I turned, I was finding thoughtful pieces of information that were valuable to the task at hand. Such an unrequested outpouring at just the right time cannot be mere coincidence or providence. There has to be a power of some kind behind it, especially when I consider that it happens over and over in my life.
The only down side of all this is that I have much more to consider now than I had planned. That along with my transition to a new therapy for my cancer will delay the planned publication date for the second part of this article for a few more days. During the wait, I hope many of you ( by many, I mean at least 100 of you ) will take the time to read or reread Part One and comment on it. It would make my day. I've never received 100 comments on any post.
Hang in there. Thanks for following my blog. I appreciate you all. Please tell your friends who like thought provoking reading about my blog.
Jack Scott
This was such a good read, thank you so much! I like to believe in destiny and that life is not simply a series of random events.
ReplyDeleteI'm with you. I think life is a random series of events only if we allow it to be.
ReplyDeleteThat does not mean I believe there is no randomness in life. If that were true we would be robots and that would be worse that the random series of events.
It seems, for me, that I have always had a destiny. Along the road to fulfill that destiny, there have been unexpected events I've had to overcome. Amazing how often those events taught we something I needed to know to help fulfill my destiny.
Jack Scott