Coincidences...or no coincidence? That is the question.

Before P told me that there were no coincidences, life carried on in much the same way as it did afterwards  because I didn't believe her. To be honest, I spent the next two years thinking that she was very knowledgeable in many ways, but a bit 'garden gnomes' when it came to thinking that life converses with fate.... I may have been a bit hasty.Not about the gnomes you understand, these are universally accepted flags of dottiness and not at all the practical 'quirkiness' of someone who, let's say for argument's sake, put a duck-egg blue woolly hat that her mother knitted, onto her teapot during the cold snap and liked it so much that she let it stay there.                                                      

I've lost my thread.........
COINCIDENCES!

I have no other way to explain what happened to me a day or two after I realised that I must be bipolar. I was already in depression, tearful and shattered when my daughter's teacher asked if I was OK . Of course, not knowing her in any personal way at all, I replied that I was. Yet, she led me to her classroom, closed the door behind me and said that she wasn't letting me out till I told her what was going on... and so, shaking and sobbing, I told her. I have no idea why, I hadn't told another soul. This virtual stranger listened calmly and in the end it was her story that surprised me for it seems that before she went into teaching, she worked for a pharmaceutical company selling bipolar medication. Tremendously reassuring and a fountain of knowledge, she informed me that the CEO of a very large confectionary brand was bipolar and managed it perfectly well. It was as though I was the unhappy heroine of a fairytale being sent her fairy godmother. She really did give me hope.

The second person that I told was a friend who had recently been in touch after a gap of 20 years. I told her because she is lovely, because I'd cancelled every one of our plans to get together and because she lived 160 miles away and so my privacy would remain relatively unaffected. I shall never forget her response to my confessional e-mail.
"I run groups on how to manage bipolar, so there's no way you are getting rid of me now." It seems she was a mental health nurse and she has been a tower of strength to me ever since.
Her explanation for the  2 person 'coincidence' that I had just encountered?
"The universe does conspire to give you what you need if you let it."