"Conditions are perfect!!!"

So the title is from a wonderfully fun, yet slightly over the top, Flight of the Conchords song. However it has its merits.
I recall my cross country career; I was a soon to be wee (and I mean really-wee. I was 5'9, having grown half a foot over summer, but a mere 120lbs) freshman, with dreams of ruling the gridiron. I was so excited to play football. I would be a great receiver, or running back. Maybe play safety, I just wanted to play. So I got to the first day of high school, and then among the announcements, they said that football would be playing their third game Friday. I never knew that sports started in the summer! Well, despondent, I was walking through the halls when I ran into Sam, a friend from middle school. He said that I should meet the Cross Country coach. My gym teachers in middle school always told me to run CC, so I accepted, met Coach V., and ran 5 races that year with a PR of 21:45, a near three minute improvement from my worst race of the year. The next season, I was all set to play football. I'd lifted a bit, putting on about 5 pounds. I ran more sprints during the track season to get faster. The football coach was the track coach, so he knew me. I was ready, but then the football team got a new coach. I was nervous, because this guy was completely new. So, I ran CC again, eventually running a 19:18 at the conference meet. Finally, Junior year. I'd talked tot he football coach in spring, I worked out hard, I'd bought cleats and gloves and gone to summer football camps and finally put on some real weight, reaching a beefy 155 (and I really did feel huge at that point). Right before the season started, I discovered that Coach V, who had been coaching at North for 2 plus decades, was retiring. I felt I owed him a season, so I put down the cleats and picked up my running spikes. The first race, I earned a varsity spot, running a high 18 minute 5-K. By the end of the season, I'd run a 17:15 and was number 2 on the team.  I was recruited by St. Norbert to run for them in college, and my senior year I was named captain and put on the fall sports poster. I am so glad I ran CC, because it led me to St. Norbert. I have since played football at the semi-pro level, as well as rugby at the club level, but I am quite glad that I had not heard that fall sports began before school.
Another example! I was recently talking to Sam ( a different one) regarding how we met. I was a Senior, she a Freshman. I was supposed to have graduated in 2012, and it was currently fall semester of 2013. So, right there, we should never have met. However, I left school following my junior year to serve a mission for my church (if you don't know that, then you must be really new to this blog!), so I was actually supposed to be back fall of 2014 at the earliest. However, knowing me, I wouldn't have sent in any paperwork to SNC previous to coming home, so I would have gone back to school in 2015. She'd be a junior to my senior, and since I'd have known no one, I would have kept completely to myself, and been basically a loner my entire senior year. Here it is again; I was released from my mission early, leading to my enrollment in school in fall of 2013. Pretty good set of conditions so far. Now, I first saw Sam (though I didn't immediately recall after we'd been introduced) at a open mic session at the Night Owl, an on campus coffee shop, with her roommate. We were 8 feet from each other, but neither of us even made eye contact. I only recalled that she was there because the guy with them had been wearing an outrageous bow tie that completely clashed with his very formal attire; a bow tie that is very much so him. I think that, as a freshman, she would have been extremely reserved and hesitant had I introduced myself to her at any point so early in the semester, and it would have been vastly awkward any time either of us saw the other at any point there after. We were finally introduced in mid-November, at a time when I had finally given blind dating a try and was feeling very lonely thereafter, and she had just met a guy who would turn out to be a bit of a singularly minded wolf of a man. I recognized one single person at a table she was sitting at, asked if I could join, and had a good time just chatting with them. I saw her consistently for days, but other than brief and boisterous 'hello there' type greetings, very little else occurred. Then, late one night, I decided to finally work on my term paper due a few days from then. I was walking to the library with headphones on, intent on ignoring anyone I passed by, when I saw a group of four walking my way. "Head down, don't make eye contact, bob as though you're listening to a good song, walk past them"; such was my internal dialogue. Well, I happened to glance up, and I saw Sam being carried around by outrageous bow tie and roommate. They loudly said 'hi', dropped her in my arms, and laughed uproariously as I threatened to carry her hostage to the library where she would be forced to research the fall of the Spanish Empire for me. I eventually put her down, and we walked away. Another happy circumstance; I was supposed to have been at the library 6 hours earlier. There was a 2 minute window where we would walk past each other, and we nailed it. So many things contributed to us meeting, and it was all at the right time.
Then there are every day examples, like when I was driving home at night in a fog (huge, heavy, dense fog), and, though I normally go only 52mph on LS, I was only going 45 or so. Well, a deer leaps in front of my car from the embankment, and I hit the brakes to miss it, just brushing it with the front driver's side corner of my hood. He was going at an angle away from my car while crossing the road, so that bought probably 2 or 3 feet of space. I was going 10mph slower than normal. I was more alert because it was foggy. If it were not for those factors, I'd have hit that deer in a way that would have left more than some fur on my headlight.
I can't track all the 'coincidences' that occur in my life. There are too many, and most which I don't even know about. However, "conditions are perfect" to have led me where I am today, and for that I am grateful.
(Written 2/23/15)