First Meetings

When we meet someone for the first time, we can have no way of knowing what their future impact upon our lives may be -- and besides, how we might shape their lives. We may never see them again, their fleeting impression erased by a night's sleep, or we may come to know them for the rest of our days. They may become a colleague, friend, lover -- even an enemy. In that frisson of first encounter all this has yet to be determined.

A chance encounter may change the direction of our lives forever; a casual remark may set in train a chain of events that, in retrospect, seems almost miraculous. A loose comment, an impulsive gesture, may redirect the course not only of our own destiny but the destinies of others. Consequently, each new encounter is pregnant with creative as well as destructive possibility. Perhaps we meet others by pure chance, perhaps they are ‘sent’, but how we respond to them -- and how they respond to us -- determines the future course of our (and their) lives. The exquisite, and at times terrifying, truth is that at that first meeting we can never know what the consequences will be.