If it’s Tuesday, This Must Be Baghdad

"When you live your life with an appreciation of coincidences and their meanings, you connect with the underlying field of infinite possibilities."—Deepak Chopra

"There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle."--Einstein

My last post was five days ago and suddenly the news is full of topics for blogger fodder. There are the inflammatory Coulter remarks, which I have a problem further publicizing due to that old cliché about correct name spelling despite the message. Today Bush made a surprise visit to Iraq. I don’t think this was meant to be a joyful surprise, like a birthday surprise party—more along the lines of not letting the thousands of locals who want him dead surprise.

And of course there was the ultimate bad-breakfast news to wake up to that an ace criminal still lurking around the White House is at long last getting off scott-free—Rove won’t be indicted in the Plamegate leak case. From what I’ve read about the prosecutor, Fitzgerald, he doesn’t have a slam-dunk (to re-use that awkward phrase) case and he won’t go to court without one.

Fun blogger stuff all. But I like to make my life difficult, so instead of proceeding with one of these obvious lines, I’d rather focus on an event in our household this morning that, when it’s all summed up, is more fascinating than anything you saw in the news today. This “happening” has to do with the same correlations of occurrences that I have written about before—coincidences—and how there is no such thing:

“A sequence of events that although accidental seems to have been planned or arranged.”

If you remove the words, “although accidental seems to have been” and insert “was” in the definition, you have the antonym, which is a design, plan, or scheme. I don’t like to think that the universe, and the forces which push and pull at our lives for some ultimate good, are “scheming.” Neither do I like the choice of language of religion which would call a certain confluence of events, “Divine Providence.” For me, Providence will always be the armpit of New England.

I will relate this story, from beginning to end, and you tell me how it could be a random series of events that just “happened to happen”—a coincidence—rather than some sort of design, perhaps induced through the intent of individuals.

A decade and a half ago, in the search for answers to a developmental issue with a young relative, my wife met a worker at a speech center who was very helpful. I will call this person Nancy Doe, for the sake of this story. Nancy and my wife were communicating often for a while at that time.
Further down the educational development of this young boy, my wife discovered a technologically cutting-edge computer-based program from Scientific Learning Corporation called “Fast Forward.” This amazing program could help young people with learning and reading processing problems become more adept—at learning, reading, and processing language. It worked on the youngster in question. A speech therapist also needed to monitor the computer program, although the entire use of “Fast Forward” took place on a PC in the child’s own home—he wore headphones and clicked answers with a mouse.

More time passes—over ten years--and another young relative is having learning and reading difficulties. My wife suggests the “Fast Forward” program to this mom, and sends some information in an email. After a while, this young mom is not moving ahead to look into the “Fast Forward” program, so my wife decides to give her more information, since now the young boy has to go to summer school in order to stay in the same grade.

Here is the delineation of events, as they happened, that made me write this post:

Yesterday, while my wife was looking at her emails, for no reason, the computer made a small “beep” noise and all of her inbox messages, over 800 of them (talk about not doing spring cleaning!) disappeared. I was summoned in a voice of semi-panic to see what was happening in digital cyber-ville. First it looked like most of the messages went into the “delete” folder, but not all of them did. Then there were some messages that she wanted that she had forwarded to herself, so those were intact in the “sent” folder.

As she went through that folder looking for several messages, she came across the email from a few months back that she had sent to her relative about “Fast Forward.” So she forwarded the email again, to remind her to look into the program.

This morning, my wife and this relative again spoke about “Fast Forward,” and my wife volunteered to call some places to find out who the speech therapist was who helped the young boy years ago. She looked in the yellow pages, and one ad jumped out at her because it indicated “help in the home.” So she called this number and a familiar woman’s voice from the past answered, “Nancy Doe speaking. May I help you?” My wife choked on her tea and simply said who she was, and they reconnected after all these years. Nancy said she was substituting for someone and usually wasn’t the person who answered the phone, and what a coincidence this was!

That’s not the end. My wife does spiritual counseling, readings, and seminars. She told Nancy Doe what is doing along these lines, and Nancy said, “I’m a spiritual medium. And I recently meditated for help in finding out how to further my career.” So they spoke about that for a while. My wife told Nancy the name of her web site: www.UniqueIntuition.com, at which point in the conversation Nancy shrieked in amazement. She had several flyers and a newspaper ad about my wife’s web site at home, but hadn’t had the time yet to look into the information.

So it starts with the strange computer glitch for no reason, goes to an email, a return phone call, and just happening to find one listing out of dozens in the yellow pages to whom to make a phone call. Coincindences? Divine scheming? Or the unfolding of a perfect universe?

I believe in free will, and I also believe in the positive energy of good intentions. And even the most grounded physics expert will tell you that energy can’t be destroyed.

"It would be possible to describe everything scientifically, but it would make no sense; it would be without meaning, as if you described a Beethoven symphony as a variation of wave pressure."--Einstein