I recently wrote about the lovely (and growing) coterie of expat bloggers I’ve crossed paths with of late (I also owe Twitter a special thank-you for that). I spotlighted ProfeConnect, a wonderful new resource connecting English teachers and students. Well, I also owe technological serendipity for the opportunity the site’s founders have given me to share even more about my first impressions of the Southern Hemisphere–of life by the Andes, of the nerves and joys of my first days in the classroom, as well as the details of my foray into TEFL certification.
The first of three posts went up today on the site! Be sure to check it out and show ProfeConnect the love. The beautiful photography is by none other than the seriously gifted Kyle Hepp! She makes everything so much prettier.
To recap a bit more of the back story, I met one of ProfeConnect’s founders via the manic email-and-tweeting-networking and professional-organization-joining I dedicated myself to pretty much full-time when I landed in Chile three months ago. But the other co-founder happened to stumble upon my blog the very same week. How does this awesomeness happen?! (Let’s not forget that I met the aforementioned Kyle all of a week and a half ago and now have the honor of sharing the page with her.)
I love that the gifts of technology, and the often solitary nature of its use, haven’t taken away that “look who I bumped into at the market” feeling you get when you connect the online dots: “Wait, she works with her? She writes for them? You know her, too? That’s your blog?! That’s her photography?” If anything, technology and an exponential ability to broadcast our thoughts to audiences far and wide has made it so that these serendipitous moments can happen at our very desks over a solo cup of coffee and a few dozen new tweets to refresh.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for the surprise run-ins at the bookstore, the ways of the Universe that made it so Jack Hutcheson could snap the photo above literally ten minutes before SF’s National Park Service cut away that tree limb we ran around a dozen or so times on the December morning we got married, and the split second decisions that are sometimes in our control (should I stay or should I go?) and sometimes aren’t (the light turned green), but that nevertheless change the course of our lives in exciting, daunting, inspiring ways. But that thrill of discovery is so similar, as is that unmistakable sense that things just couldn’t-have-happened-at-any-other-time-or-any-other-way (or they could have, but they wouldn’t have been nearly as cool). It all goes back to looking for ways to connect–be it social networking or superimposing the events in our lives in interesting ways. Nowadays, we’re just finding that connection virtually as much as we are in person.
What’s happened to you lately that’s made you wonder just how this fair Universe of ours really works? Whether you call it luck or chance or fate or coincidence or kismet or simply life (with so many words for the same phenomenon, it’s clear it’s something to be pondered), how did the rules bend or break so that you could make the train on time? Or miss it and make a new friend instead? What tree limbs did you capture just in the nick of time?
While you’re pondering, I hope you enjoy the guest blog, ProfeConnect, and all the happy serendipities in your life of late.
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