Year ago, working in a large community hospital, I was invited to join the local Rotary Club. It was the right thing to do professionally and I enjoyed getting to know a great group of people committed to an agenda of good works. I was asked, sometime early in my membership, to introduce myself to the group. I’d been attending as a guest for a few months but now I was “official” and it was my opportunity to tell the entire group about myself. There were two other new members that day and each of us was allotted about 10 minutes to share our stories.

I thought about how I might do this, how I might tie together the elements of my life to that point and I found myself recognizing that there hadn’t been a roadmap for my journey, that when a door opened in front of me, well, I walked through it. That is still whom I am, to this day.

I ended up creating a page of six photos of different aspects of my life and my career, those images that summarized what mattered most to me. Each photo was chosen to be a little thought provoking, either in circumstances or the way the photo was taken and I numbered each one of them in the corners.

As I was called on to make my presentation, I passed copies of this sheet of photos out to each of the attendees. When I got to the podium, I explained that I realized the unifying element in my story was serendipity, the events that took place, in large part, by happy chance. And I asked my listeners to call out a number and I would explain that aspect of my life.

What were those pictures? One of them, as I recall, was a high school age picture of me happily behind a microphone in our high school radio station. Had there not been a station there, had it not intrigued me, my life would have taken a different course. I became active in the station, I did programs, I was a licensed engineer and I led fundraising drives to help keep the station viable. My mother, always my key supporter, would drive me to the donut shop every morning early. I would pick up coffee and donuts and set up a table near the school’s main staircase, selling these items, at a small markup, to raise money for the station.

One day, the teacher who advised the station sat me down and asked me what I was planning to major in when I went to college. I had no idea and he suggested communication. And so it was. And those experiences, communication, fundraising and leadership have marked the course of my career.

The other pictures—my husband (now former) and me at junior prom, foreshadowing both marriage and family. My father, holding me as a baby, and likely already defining his expectations in my infant ear. His difficult early days in Poland, his life as a teenage immigrant to the United States, shaped his own life but, even more so, his dreams for his children. Even working in my first hospital role happened through a chance conversation in, of all places, the waiting room of an oral surgeon’s office. I was having a difficult time, despite my degrees, finding a job and, in a random conversation, this woman I had never met before suggested I might do an internship in Marketing and Development at a local hospital. I had never thought about working in that environment but, indeed, I have really never left healthcare since!

Not everything is, of course, serendipitous. Many of us plan our next steps, set our goals and move forward to achieve them. Whether we walk through the door that opens in front of us is a choice and there is no wrong answer—only the one that we choose and with which we are comfortable. We have to “play the hand we’re dealt” but how we play it is rife with options.

It sounds naive, perhaps, to say that “things have a way of working themselves out” but I believe those words to be completely true. Life is challenging, complicated and stressful. We live with grief and loss and disappointment. But life is also filled with opportunity and joy, excitement and passion. For most of us, our journey will offer all of those elements, it is up to us how we accept, embrace and allow them to help fill our full hearts.