Moments

 Few moments in life are actually life- changing. The big ones you can usually count on one hand.

 

I was sitting in a conference room in the offices section of my school, when the head of the Lower School asked me if I wanted to stay. My grades were terrible, I had virtually no friends, and was generally unhappy from my parents’ divorce and emotional underdevelopment. I said I did want to stay, and for the next six or so years, until I graduated in eighth grade, that spur-of-the-moment, I-think-this-is-what-I’m-supposed-to-say answer defined my childhood through middle school. Upon graduating I still didn’t have any friends, and my grades were still lousy.

 

Out of precaution I’d applied to eight high schools, and got into maybe three or four, but only one gave enough financial aid. I went out and toured it – to save money we only wanted to tour the boarding schools I’d gotten into. It seemed like a nice enough place, but I was certainly wary. Once again, the answer was a default, what I was supposed to say. It turned out to be a good fit, as was my college choice, which happened in a fairly similar fashion, just opting for what seemed correct.

 

Of course, some important moments aren’t active choices. When I was offered my first teaching job it was due to total luck. Living in Boston it was nearing October – the school year had already begun, so I’d reluctantly started looking at barista jobs – any kind of work that would pay me. During a phone interview for a job in Reno, I was asked what I like to do for fun, and I replied travel; then I expanded to demonstrate how it made me a better history teacher. Using Turkey, and the Topkapi Palace, as my example, I got the job. The man I was talking to, it turned out, was Turkish. I had almost chosen to talk about Greece.

 

During that recession many of my jobs felt like good luck and fortune that kept me going. Eventually, after traveling both abroad and back to the east coast, I returned to California. The first year back, for spring break, we decided to road trip, as a family, to help bring back my stuff that was in Boston. Outside Little Rock we got in a terrible car crash. It would end up being one of the most important moments of my life – swerving to avoid a car that was merging into me. Once I’d gotten back to the Bay Area, I had a follow-up doctor’s appointment, and that appointment led to them discovering the lump in my thyroid.

 

Were it not for that crash, the lump may have gone undetected for years. I was treated that summer for mild hyperthyroidism, and from then on we always kept track of my thyroid, which ended up being a good thing, because a few years later my endocrinologist, in a routine thyroid ultrasound, found some lumps on my lymph nodes. It turns out I had thyroid cancer, which had spread to the adjacent nodes. I got a thyroidectomy, and a second treatment of radioactive iodine – as I’d done for the hyperthyroidism. Since thyroid cancer is asymptomatic, and usually found in older patients, that car crash set off a frankly incredible chain of events that may have saved my life.

 

In-between the hyperthyroidism and the cancer, though, was another transformative moment. One day, at a faculty appreciation luncheon, I was looking for a place to sit, and opted for a table of people I didn’t know – because there was a beautiful young woman there. We went on our first date not too long after, and a little over a year later we were living together, before eventually getting married. That wasn’t even the first time a seat at a table had proven providential – my main friend group in college was stumbled upon in the same way. By the time they’d all introduced themselves, I thought ‘Oh my god. I’m going to have to remember all of these peoples’ names.’ So I kept sitting with them, and years later the guy who’d sat at the head of the table was asked to be the officiant at our wedding.

 

The choices to stay at or attend a school, the fortunate job interview, sitting down at the right table, the car crash that led to a cancer diagnosis. Some of these moments radiated gravitas at the time (also true of many not noted, which at the time seemed life-altering, and turned out not to be). Others were totally accidental happenstance. Change any one and my life would have been radically different. I tend to have an abhorrence of arbitrariness, but I have to concede that much of my life’s path has been, if not entirely random, not far removed. As I continue my cancer treatment, it’s given me time to pause and take stock of these significant moments which have defined my life, but also in the light of their randomness, and the cosmic randomness that defines existence, to consider what it means to live.