Yes, lost my long-time friend and fiancée (a car hit us... I survived, she didn't) while coming back from the beach. We were living together, doing our studies together at the same university and we were in planification stage of our wedding and may be soon parent (i will never know...)

I’ve dropped all of that, couldn’t continue without her, never came back to my town and moved far from it. I switched off my brain for 6 months, refiling paper and ink in a littke shop.

So a complete change of life due to a 5 min event and a drunk driver who didn’t stop to help...

One day, a little old lady who i was helping told me a sentence i will never forgot: "young man, you seems very intelligent/clever.. i hope you don’t plan to do your actual job forever"

She was rigth, i was destroying myself in this shitty job. So i sent resume to the big companies around me, at random. To do something totally different than my original formation.

I got hired in a very big corpororation at a middle entry level (as i didn’t got my engineer diploma). In the following decades, I’ve focused only on my job (was still in denial), slowly raising in the organization, and I’ve managed to have a very good career that exceed now - by far - the level i would had with the initial diploma. And because i started by the low level, i have a real good experience that help me a lot today.

But all this success and money didn’t stop me to encounter several depression periods, burn-out, etc... I’m following a therapy since my last very serious depression 2 years ago but i’m still unable to get in couple. I’m still working on that.

Sometime, i wonder what could have been our life if we departed 5 min earlier or later. Or if i didn’t encounter this old grandma (probably dead today) in this shop.

It’s crazy how our life and direction can be so random.