Personal Weirdness

If you think back through life, you will probably recollect unusual coincidences that seem impossible.
 
Me too. But none of what follows is to suggest that what I describe attributes anything special to me, or beyond what any reader of this cannot relate to.
 
I recently listened to a program on the radio about the development of rocketry. Werner von Braun was being discussed, and just before the speaker was going to state the year of his death, I tried to guess it. I thought 1977. The commentator then said, "1977." I knew nothing about his life. I impressed me very much.
 
Here's another example shared with my wife. She had been setting the alarm so she could get up early to see the kids off to school. On this particular morning, there was no school and thus no need for the alarm to go off. At about 5 AM, I  awoke and remembered that she probably had the alarm set. So, I quietly crept around to her side, where the alarm clock rested on a nightstand within her reach. When I got to the stand, I reached for the clock to press in the little alarm-off button.
 
I hadn't made a sound. But as my hand was on the clock, she stirred. I froze with my hand on the clock. Then, to my amazement, I felt her hand probing the top of my hand, searching for the alarm-off button. She was going to get up and didn't want the alarm to awaken me.
 
After surveying my hand for a moment, she slowly pulled her hand back. I held my position with my hand still on the clock, hoping she would just fall back asleep. No such luck. Her hand returned, this time timidly feeling and squeezing this strange fleshy protuberance growing out of the top of her clock in the pitch black.
 
I thought by then that she was fully awake and knew it was my hand, so I grabbed hers in fun. Then all hell broke loose as she yanked her hand back and began yelling, kicking, and swinging. I tried to quiet her, but she would have nothing to do with that. She jumped up, and amongst expletives, out the door she went. Talk about good intentions gone bad!
 
She returned in a few minutes after she had gathered herself, realized she was awake, and that it was not an alien she had just encountered. I explained and then we began to laugh ourselves silly. We still laugh about it to this day.
 
Anyway, the point is that something went on between her mind and mine, unspoken, unheard, that made her hand meet mine in that particular instant on that fateful morning on top of the alarm clock. The probability of it happening by chance was just far too remote.
 
Here's another instance of the two of us being on the same wavelength. One winter, we made a snowboarding trip with the kids and their friends. We were staying in a small apartment in a rather remote area. On an afternoon when everyone was away, I decided to walk into the mountains and find a place to lie down in the warm sun. I took no established path and set out up a hill facing south where the sun had melted all the snow. Several hundred yards away from the apartment, I found a secluded spot to soak up the wonderful sun on what was otherwise a pretty cold day.
 
I settled in, but then heard the cracking of brush nearby. With the prospect of a bear, I was quickly at full alert. Watching through the brush, I heard my name called. It was my wife within 20 feet of me!
 
I have no idea how she found me and neither does she. She just says she went in the direction she thought I would be. She had 360 degrees of options, and she chose the precise one.

​On and off for several days, John, an old grade school and sports buddy came to mind. While in the middle of work one afternoon, the thought came to me to phone him, even though I had not seen nor heard from him in over thirty years. At first, I put it aside. I was busy. Besides, I wasn't sure if he still lived in the city where we grew up. But the urge persisted and welled up in me like a duty. So, I put my work aside and searched for his number and called. His wife answered, and we briefly exchanged some pleasantries. Then I asked if I might speak to John. Silence. Then, "John just died a few days ago." I felt terrible that I had not made contact with him sooner when he had come to mind, possibly when he was thinking of me.
 
Finally, here's another example. I was writing an article and lost the graphic below. The day after I realized this, I received an email from my grown daughter who was living apart from me. In that email was a link to the graphic below that I had lost.
 
The Kennedy-Lincoln similarities are as unlikely as my daughter sending me the graphic exactly when I needed it.

Experiences like these remind us that life occasionally presents connections so improbable they deserve more than a casual shrug. We call them coincidence, synchronicity, or even evidence of a deeper interconnected reality.
 
Their benefit is that they invite us to remain curious, rather than assuming we already know all there is to know about how minds and all seen and unseen realities are connected.

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