Coincidences: More Than Mere Happenstance

I am listening to my MP3 player, a book called Bloodroot in which women from a given family are blessed, or cursed, with unusual powers, when the narrator says the word ‘focus’ at the exact same time that I look at the rear of the Ford in front of me and my eyes land on the word Focus.

I have spent the better part of two days trying to decipher the meaning and purpose behind this oddly intriguing coincidence. It reminded me of another coincidence that happened a number of years ago when my wife and I met my niece in a restaurant we frequented in East Longmeadow, Massachusetts. My niece lived in Southwick, Massachusetts, a good twenty miles away. Admittedly she had her own life and there could have been any number of reasons she would be in the same restaurant at the same time as my wife and me. It turns out that the restaurant was in a small mall with seating in a promenade and she was there to pick up a resized engagement ring she had dropped off some time previously at a local jeweler.

Coincidences , by their very definition, are events that happen by chance, but seem to have some connection. We’ve all experienced them, I’m sure, but most people, maybe all people, maybe everyone in the known world and universe but me, shrugs them off as, well, coincidences; of no more significance than finding something a week after you thought you had lost it.

But maybe there is more to it than that. Maybe these coincidences are really nodes, critical points of decision that propel an incredibly convoluted and complicated process in one direction or another. And perhaps knowing this, knowing of the existence of these nodes and the associated process, allows one to consciously and significantly affect that process, even if the ultimate purpose of the process is unknown.

So my niece shows up at a restaurant in East Longmeadow, twenty miles from home, ostensibly to get an engagement ring resized. In the end it turns out the engagement is called off, so her whole trip to East Longmeadow was for naught. But perhaps there was another reason for our meeting. Perhaps at this particular node we were destined to make certain choices, which we did, and those choices propelled the process in directions it would otherwise never have considered going and toward an end which had now caused it to deviate significantly from what it was just minutes before.

And perhaps my unique mental acuity has allowed me to recognize these coincidences, these nodes for what they are, and the apparently innocuous intersection of the word ‘focus’ spoken in an MP3 book at the same time I glance at a Ford Focus in front of me is really a message, an instruction, a warning to, obviously, focus.

Focus on what you might reasonably ask? Any answer might do here I suppose, but it seems pretty obvious to me that the instruction was to focus on honing the ability to recognize the nodes and to take decisive action when one is presented.

The next obvious step, of course, would be to know with certainty what would be the ramifications of decisions made or not made at these particular nodes, and their effect on the process.

But that way certainly leads to madness.