Right Place, Right Time

Is it possible to be in the right place at the right time?

Who decides this right and wrong business, anyway?  One might suggest Abraham Lincoln was in the wrong place when he entered the Ford's Theater that night, but what if he was in the right place after all - just a day early?  What if John Wilkes Booth had been caught that night, sneaking around with a gun and a half-baked plot?

I mean, I know I've been in the right place at the wrong time.

I was a day late to the airport in Chicago when I was 22.  Or 21.  Either of those ages sound perfectly fine, so either could be right, but I was certainly wrong when I tried to fly out of Midway after a weekend with my girlfriend's family.  If only I'd been there at the right time, I might've saved myself the cost of a ticket-readjustment fee: roughly 150 USD and my pride.

Oops.

Years later, I was at the wrong place when I tried to help my wife get her driver's license renewed, a fateful fiasco that ended in tears: our failure to locate the DMV jumpstarted the series of events that lost her license, social security card, and birth certificate to the nethers.  If only I'd been at the right place over my lunch hour, we'd have made it through okay.  (Sometimes Google Maps really isn't the best.)

I was at the wrong place again after having written a short story for a national Fine Arts competition.  I only found out months later that the piece I wrote won fifth place, nationally.  I celebrated quietly, but I celebrated alone and with little fanfare.  It had certainly been the right time when I won, but I was at home.  Oblivious.

But what about being in the right place at the right time?  Perhaps it's just as possible. Put yourself in my shoes, and consider:

Viewing the Fourth of July fireworks from your balcony with your sweetheart after you've moved to a new town and you don't know anyone or anything - not even where else to go watch the sky light up.  Renting just the right video game on a whim, because whoever heard of playing a game about farming, anyway?  Standing up in front of people you'd only known for a little over a month and successfully convincing them to elect you as one of their representatives.

Sometimes it's difficult, in light of otherwise mundane affairs, to understand the depth or breadth your actions today will have on your life tomorrow, but you press on even when all the signs say you're in the wrong place at the wrong time.

You draft another novel.  You move to another new town.  You spend another month wondering when your family will grow a little bit.  You laugh with your brother over a silly joke you might barely remember in the morning.

Maybe I'm in the right place at the right time, right now.