Words are inadequate

It was meant to be a most-drastic-case scenario: shorthand for "go do this, something good might come of it." Just the point being that a lot of the things that do change our lives look fairly small and incidental-- a conversation that makes you pay more attention to person X at the right moment, or stopping a moment before you hit that other car, and there's no way to know what factors you couldn't anticipate from that other path.

My grandparents met on a bus because she had to finish college somewhere she could go from home because of the depression and he had bought some kind of varnish that failed to dry and was taking it back to the store to complain. This sort of craziness is less likely to happen to those of us who try not to talk to strangers on buses, but I don't think the chances that brought grauwulf and me to start particularly paying attention to each other were any less coincidental.

Not that I mean to denigrate being in a place where you're comfortable enough to look back and not want to change things for fear of sacrificing what you've got.