How Likely Is That?

If I pretend that parts of my past are future possibilities, they seem incredibly unlikely. For example, last week I took a trip to Norway in January. If someone had suggested that to me about 5 years ago, I would have laughed in their face. I wouldn't have known then that Julia was going to marry a Norwegian. Nor would I have known that they would make me a grandpa. I certainly would not have thought that my daughter, son-in-law, and grandson would all be packing up to move to Tanzania on January 17, 2008.

Some of the roads not taken are even more incredible. Julia and Viggo seriously considered going to Mali, probably specifically to Timbuktu. Recently I read a great book on languages, The Power of Babel. The author used the Fulani language as his prime example of an incredibly complicated language among all the thousands in the world. Julia and Viggo would have been working on a project to translate the Old Testament into Fulani (or a close cousin language).
I would be telling people that my daughter moved to Timbuktu to translate the bible into Fulani.

It seems that most peoples' lives are a concatenation of events that they simply would not believe were they foretold. That is probably worth remembering when it seems that we are headed down a track we don't like.