Coincidence, is defined as an improbable synchronicity of events, on face value, unrelated but occurring with no apparent causal connection.
Like the time, several years ago, when I told my little sister to pause a few minutes, ( before departing a bar we had never before frequented and had spontaneously selected for a casual beer stop), because I had this strange feeling of certainty that in the next few moments Sue and Pete, (visiting friends of mine from Australia), were going to walk in the door and join us……and of course they did. All un-arranged, all of us spread throughout the vastness of the nation…. What were the odds of this happening at this particular time in this particular place? “How could you have known” Asked my little sister?
The long arm of coincidence strikes again.
A texture where the delicate arm of life’s fabric has rippled, unbidden, unwanted but inexorably presented in the inexplicable here and now.
What are the odds?
And again where, on a spontaneous, unplanned quick trip to Britain in 1979, I suddenly bumped into Foxie in Trafalgar Square, beneath Nelson’s column where a million people, at any given moment, teem and mingle in their frantic rush of busy, busy life. Foxie was, at that time, a neighbor from Raurimu, a remote and dwindling woodcutters hamlet, Embedded in the depths of the King Country of New Zealand. I had no idea Foxie was in Britain nor he that I was there. Ten seconds either way and either of us would have been swallowed by the rushing crowd, Arabs, black Africans, Algerians, Russians, Jews and Bengalis all teeming in their own tangent in a crossfire flood of humanity…and we, oblivious to each other’s presence….just bumped into each other….Foxie! What the f..ck are you doing here?
Again, what are the odds?
Many blame the paranormal, some put it down to extra sensory perception, the religious insist it is the hand of God, intervening. The huge majority of us put the long arm of coincidence down to happenstance, blind luck, burying our suspicions in the hurly burly of our lives, burying the disconcerting actuality amid the great unknown in that murky corner of our minds where the unexplained is deposited, unwanted, in that repository…the too hard basket.
But the chaotic nature of life throws up coincidence with alarming and disconcerting frequency, defying the principles of probability, intruding into the realm denying rational explanation. Leaving us, with the vaguely uncomfortable pretext that Albert Einstein theory that the phenomenon of unexplained coincidence should be interpreted, until proven otherwise,
......as “GOD’S CALLING CARD”!
M.
Foxglove, Taranaki NZ