Do You Believe in Coincidence?
So here I am on the mid-week of January. The first month in year whose early week I spent on hectic moments due to heaps of take home exams that struck all of the fifth semester students badly. But well, those hectic moments seems won’t stop for now, although it’s holiday. I’ll be stuck on some agendas continuously for this week. But what I enjoy most from these busy days are some little surprising events that popped up around the hectic moments.
First happened in Monday, the time when I was going to Unsoed Purwokerto for roadshow of Pekan Komunikasi, in which I am in charge as the coordinator of ‘Media Matters’. At the first, I didn’t intend to join the roadshow to Purwokerto as I’d already had appointment on Tuesday. But after I was told that we would directly back to Jakarta at the same day, directly after presentation session in the campus, I decided to take part.
So, there I was, had lunch in Unsoed campus before starting presentation. I casually talked about our events, particularly KineKomunikasi whose concept is movie screening of ‘Sang Penari’, a movie that adopted from one of the best literature novel from Ahmad Tohari, Ronggeng Dukuh Paruk. I told them we had been inviting Ifa Isfansyah, Sang Penari’s director as our speaker, but it was pity for us not inviting Ahmad Tohari, the author of Ronggeng Dukuh Paruk because of difficulty to figure out the way to contact him.
Having heard me, Laras, one of the Unsoed’s student who greeted us, said, “Oh well, Rio is the nephew of Ahmad Tohari” while this Rio was also had lunch with us. And it was like I hear someone said ‘Voila!’ inside my head. I directly asked him the contact number of Ahmad Tohari. They told me that his dwell was not too far from the Unsoed campus and he often be speaker in seminars, workshops, or even guest lecture. Without giving it second thought, I gave the contact number to Tora, as the PIC of KineKom, and asked Tora to contact him directly.
At first, Tora had an objection to this sudden plan. He said to me that there was a possibility that our event will be biased as from the initial it’s not designed to have two perspectives between book and film. But I said to him, that could be the plus point, as we can present comprehensive discussion of the movie to our audiences. Besides, the name of Ahmad Tohari would surely attract more people to come to our cinema. So I advised Tora to try contacting him first, moreover we had nothing to lose. However, I said to Tora that the final decision was on his hand as he was the PIC of KineKom and my job was only directing the PIC.
Right after we finished the presentation session, I received surprised call from Tora. He said he had contacted Ahmad Tohari, and the great author said he agreed to be our speaker! Not only got the ‘yes’ from him, Tora even made a deal about the technical details like fee, accommodation, and transportation for Ahmad Tohari during the events. All of the requests from Ahmad Tohari were not burdening us, it way more benefits us, I thought.
That moment felt like happened in really quick time, less than 2 hours we had got Ahmad Tohari. It was really surprising, like you live your past dream that you’ve never thought about again, and suddenly it come true in front of your eyes. It’s like cosmical coincidence, right; the moment when we found Ahmad Tohari’s nephew right in front of our face might be the gate of KineKom’s fortune. Is it? Well, I rather say yes, but also no.
What if I didn’t decide to join roadshow in Purwokerto? What if didn’t tell my new friends about KineKom? What if Laras didn’t say a thing about the fact Rio was Ahmad Tohari’s nephew? What if I didn’t ask Ahmad Tohari’s number or decided to delay contact him directly? What if Tora insisted on his doubt? What if we remained on initial plan and didn’t give it a try?
Those questions brought me whispering an answer to myself. Even if it was coincidence, it still went through the process to make it be the fate.
Every coincidence could come to us. It’s like meeting someone in the rare moment when you’re waiting for the interview and having nice conversations as if you’ve known him for long time. Or, it’s happened on your rush walk heading somewhere, and one of your brightest lecturer passed by and all of sudden asked you to be his/her pupil for your final thesis. They could be little events, but feels like surprise presents that unexpectedly came without any precedents or any plans, and successfully made your day.
It’s like what’s been said on the movie 500 Days of Summer, it was that you can’t ascribe great cosmic significance to a simple earthly event. That’s all anything ever is, nothing more than coincidence.
However, those coincidence might be turned out drastically different depend on what I did afterwards. Someone we met out of the all of chances might be someone that we’ve been really looking for, only when we decided to believe that and we follow this belief. The lecturer’s proposal might be the promising opportunity to get a brilliant thesis supervisor only when we decided to say yes and trust his/her to take an important role in bringing us to our graduation dream.
Indeed, it’s really true if there is something meant to be, it’s fully up to us, to make it happen or not. Whether we really hope it or not, whether we decided to follow this hope or not. So after all, I believe in coincidence, that every chance of coincidence could be our fate, if only we decide to believe that it might become true, and we follow it.
“Maybe chance is a pretty common thing after all. Those kinds of coincidences are happening all around us, all the time, but most of them don’t catch our attention and we just let them go by. It’s like fireworks in the daytime. You might hear a faint sound, but even if you look up at the sky you can’t see a thing. But if we’re really hoping something may come true, it may become visible, like a message rising to surface. Then we’re able to make it out clearly, decipher what it means..”
