Analyst

All the best things in my life were unplanned. Fruitful loves came when I searched not for the one, and the insight that I could choose happiness dropped in my lap almost like a bolt reaching down to a tree. How lucky I am, to have received grace through this sudden shock. In fact the analogy strikes deeper than I originally intended: a year before I entered the nanotechnology engineering program at the University of Waterloo, from which I dropped out after two semesters, a student in the previous year's new cohort had been struck by lightning and killed. Her first week in Canada, and her family back home had to receive news of her death. Such was the work of fate, and the knowledge that anyone could die at any moment caused me great anxiety til at last I was free.