How did you meet your significant other?
We really met at a music festival over forty years ago.
We had crossed paths before. We were both on a beach mission team at Ulladulla on the South Coast of NSW. We had a common friend, and I remember her singing one night in a coffee shop. But nothing happened then.
Later I heard that someone was putting together a team to run a coffee shop at the Narara Music Festival. It sounded like fun, so I asked around to see who else might come. She was the only one available. So we drove up together. And that is probably where the relationship began.
Not with a dramatic moment. Not with some sudden realization that this was the person I would spend my life with. I just remember that the trip felt comfortable. Conversation came easily. We enjoyed being together.
That seems important to me now, because we often imagine that the big moments in life will feel big when they happen. We think we will recognize them. We expect some kind of indicator that says: pay attention, this matters. But often there is no signal.
A friendship deepens on a car trip. A career begins with an ordinary conversation. A decision made almost casually changes the direction of a life. We only understand the importance of these moments later, when we look back and see what flowed from them.
Narara itself was memorable enough. We spent our time going back and forth between the coffee shop and the main stage, listening to some great music. Then on the Sunday night the heavens opened. Rain swept through the festival, the place turned to mud, and people packed up and left early the next morning.
The festival did not last. But the relationship did. More than forty years later, what stays with me is not just the music or the mud or the coffee shop. It is the thought that one of the most important things in my life began in a moment that did not look important at all.
A car trip. An easy conversation. A weekend at a music festival. And a lifetime together flowed from there.
Here is a previous blog about that weekend: The Festival That Failed
The Afterword 
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