Snow Melt

The Impact of Random Ecounters

The June 3, 2013 prompt for "Blogging Circle of Friends Prompt Forum"  is
Tell us about someone you met randomly that's made an impact on your life?

First, let me state that don't think random encounters that have an impact on a person are random. If an encounter has an impact on a person it was meant to happen, which means that God or fate or whatever you want to attribute the event to had a reason for arranging the encounter. Second, for the past six to twelve months most of my random encounters have occurred in the grocery store or in the parking lot of a grocery store. This doesn't limit the impact these "random" encounters have on me, but they do confirm what I already believe about random encounters.

For instance, the grocery store where I usually shop just completed a rearrangement of their product. The only parts of the store that didn't get moved to opposite ends of the building was t he deli department, the fresh produce department, and the meat department. The eggs and butter (or what passes for butter in this day) are no longer with the milk and other dairy products. Before they moved almost every item around I could find what I wanted without too much walking and looking for the things I commonly purchase. Now I have to rely on random encounters with people who have purchase the item I am looking to buy.

Before I went to the store this morning, I had already decided on the items I wanted to purchase. I need some personal item, a filter for my water pitcher, and non-diet soda. I bought the personal items first because I knew they were three or four aisles away from the soda and other non-refrigerated canned drinks. I picked up the personal items and then picked up some cherry Dr. Pepper. Since I was on the same side of the store as the eggs, I remembered I need eggs so I bought the eggs and went to find the pitcher filter. In the aisle where the filter was located I encounter a man carrying a single banana (I think he was buying his lunch), the banana looked good, so I went to the produce section to pick out some bananas.

By the time I left the grocery store I had more then what I went in to get. After I got the bananas, I decided I needed some meat frozen meat patties and frozen potatoes to go with the eggs for breakfast. The only thing I didn't purchase was bread because there is a place I can pick up a free loaf of day old bread, which is usually a more expensive and better brand then I would purchase in the grocery store. Anyway that covers the chance encounter that impacted me today, I'll probably have more intriguing random encounters if and when I go anywhere else this week.

Thought of the Day: "The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun." - Christopher McCandless