When I was a Freshman in high school, I was eating lunch in the noisy cafeteria with one of my only friends at the time. Another girl with cropped short hair and thin braids, plopped down next to us and started talking. It had only been about a year into living in Maryland. My family had moved from Astoria, N.Y. I suffered from culture shock. My peers were not enamoured with me. Instead they called me "Stupid Susan" and enjoyed making fun of me in a multitude of ways.
Like me, she didn't sport soccer shorts or have the perfect blond hair pulled into a ponytail. She didn't wear Keds. She looked like she feared gym class as much as I did. However, she did not look like a typical New Yorker, either. She looked like artsy crossbreed of a punk and a hippie. I was afraid her sitting next to me would rock my fragile world and bring on more teasing.
In the conversation that ensued, she mentioned she was a vegetarian and talked about animal cruelty. I had little knowledge of this area as my family were meat eating Catholic Republicans. Now, there was always that esoteric side, but my mother had no idea that she was doing anything different than what a typical God-fearing woman was doing. I ate little meat because I didn't have the palate for it. But nothing crossed my mind about doing it. I absolutely loved animals, but the concept of animal cruelty was foreign to me. I brushed off this girl as strange.
Little could I know that merely 2 years later, I would not just consider her thoughts on animals, but become a PETA-loving vegetarian. Twenty two years later, I still walk this path (just not as preachy as I was in my youth and not torturing myself with PETA videos). I thought about her several times a year since I made that life changing decision. I always wanted to tell her how she literally changed my life.
We cannot always see these marvelous pieces of life's puzzles and how they lock together creating something bigger than we envisioned. Yet, they happen, little by little. How could I have known that at the age of 16, my choice to not eat meat would not only turn into a lifelong decision, but also reflect my soul?
I have always had a deep connection of my past lives since I was a child. In my twenties, memories flooded my mind. In my thirties, I remembered a moment living in India, sitting in lotus on a golden sand covered ground as an old man with long white hair, wearing only a loin cloth. I remembered being a Buddhist monk in a prison cell, tortured by my captures, made to sit in lotus,once again in meditation. With each of these memories, I knew that I was meant to be a vegetarian, having been one previously.
I raised my daughter to understand vegetarianism (her father and I had to compromise with what meat she ate as a young child since he was a meat eater). This one moment sitting at a lunch table reminded me of my soul's nature, influenced my child's life, and then, when the time came again for me to enter into Hindu beliefs, naturally folded into perfect synchronicity without struggle.
The other day, two potential artistic and spiritual opportunities arose for me. I wanted to seize them both and asked friends to send me prayers, Reiki and well wishes. I said to chant "Yes" for me, using a collective power of attraction. What was funny was how the next day, something interesting happened.
I felt this urge to find this woman and thank her. I had felt it before, but never so strongly. It was as if I was lifted to my feet and made to walk into my living room, scoop up old yearbooks and search for her face. I did not remember what graduating year she was or that of her younger sister. I heard an inner voice say to me "Now is the time."
Two yearbooks later, I found her sister, and then, knowing the first name and now last name of the person I was looking for, found her in about five minutes. Next, I searched through Facebook and Google to find nothing. I found her sister's email on an alumni listing, only to find the email bounce back. I tried once more on Google, this time adding our high school name into the search. What came up to my surprise was a dear friend's website who had passed away. On there, she was interviewed. She had changed her name. One more search and I had found her.
Twenty years will change people. She looked nothing like I remembered her. However, she still had that spark of originality and was still simply beautiful. I sent an email. I wanted to thank her for changing my life. Sometimes people who influence you in amazing ways just never know. I didn't want that to happen. I could not go a lifetime without this woman knowing that because of her words, I became a vegetarian, fell deeper into who my soul was, and subsequently raised a pescetarian (one who doesn't eat red meat or poultry, only fish).
Each of us, every moment we speak, we take action, we think, we are tossing a rock into a body of water creating ripples. We cannot see how that can remotely make a difference. It does. I love the phrase "hindsight is 20/20." How could we see what has only begun to unfold? How could we know how we influenced a situation or living being until the dust has settled?
When I woke up the morning after I sent my email, I found such clarity in part my life that I was blindly living in. It prompted me to have a difficult conversation with a person to share that I could not support the consumption of meat. This conversation had the potential to change my future. But my eyes were wide open with a realization that had not occurred to me previously. I believed that all of those prayers, incense burning, shouts of "Yes!" of my friends all accumulated in perfect synchronicity for what I needed at that moment. It was not what I expected, but what I needed.
About a day after my email, the girl from high school, replied. She said that my message was also timely for her. She saw it as a sign influencing a choice in her life. We both, in the span of a couple of days, received what we each needed without knowing the gift we were giving one another.
I have found that there are no coincidences in life. Simply, properly timed moments, stirred by some invisible force. And that force leads us to connecting to and supporting the higher good for ourselves and others.
