connections

This past weekend I ventured over to the mall to get "secret santa" gifts for my friends. I have never heard of this cute tradition until I got here. I'm Jewish, and back at home all of my friends are Jewish, I am just surrounded by a Jewish population, anything relating to christmas is unheard of. Whats ironic is that here at Skidmore most of my friends are not Jewish, so it's a nice change of pace and I get to experience a new culture and it's traditions. Sometimes its awkward too, because I didn't even know when christmas was and or what kinds of things people do on christmas. My so called christmas knowledge is my friend and I going out to see movies and eating chinese food on christmas eve.

Anyways thats a little background information tangent to my main, crazy story that happened to me this weekend. As I was perusing around the Wilton mall, thinking of secret santa gifts, I was sucked into a women and a man selling a nail product, to make one's nails healthy and shiny in just seconds. I am the person to get targeted for these kinds of things, everyone else is able to walk by casually and say "no thank you," but I fall for everything, I'm a pretty passive person so I can't just walk by and say no like the rest of the population does. So as this women is cleaning and putting some kind of product on my nails, I recognized her accent, it was Israeli. Over the summer I worked at a summer camp as an art teacher, and my co worker was also from Israel. I learned that all of the women in Israel at the age of 18 must go into the army, its a pretty scary thought, but that is the culture, could you imagine yourself having to go to the army at 18? I can't, I rather take a year of straight calculus then go into the army.

We started making small talk, and she recently just got out of the army, she seemed about the same age as the women I worked with over summer named Or. I took a wild chance and asked her if she knew of Or. To my surprise she said yes, and that happened to be one of her best friends, of all people and places, and Or's. Or is one of the most common girls name in Israel, its equivalent to Sarah in the United States, there are about a thousand Or's in Israel.

This moment was so surreal to me, I'm starting to believe in the statement that everything happens for a reason and that an individuals life is interconnected. Here I was in the middle of upstate New York, at a mall in the middle of total suburbia, and I strike up some conversation with a sales lady and she happens to know the one women and friend that I worked with over the summer in California, it's just too weird. A lot of these kind of surreal coincidences and moments have happened to me before, I am starting to truly believe that things DO happen for a reason, and the people you meet in life at the experiences that we have, create a place for meaning. Although that particular moment in the Wilton mall wasn't symbolic or even meaningful, it just goes to show how small and interconnected our world really is.