Read an Excerpt
What a Coincidence!
the wow! factor in synchronicity and what it means in everyday life
By Susan M. Watkins Moment Point Press
Copyright © 2005 Susan M. Watkins
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60925-535-0
CHAPTER 1
Yikes! What Was That?
A Few Opening Salvos
1. I'm standing by the register in the local organic foods store in Watkins Glen, New York, talking with co-owner Bob about the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday as he bags my purchases. He says that he and his wife are going to stay home and take a much-needed day of rest. I tell him I'm going to stay home myself, and watch a couple Woody Allen movies. Bob says, that's funny—he's been thinking all day about his favorite Woody Allen movies, especially "Sleeper." Laughing gently at himself, he says, you remember "Sleeper," don't you—where the guy wakes up in the next century and the health foods are sugar and cigarettes?
Instantly, as if on precise cue, as Bob says the word "cigarettes," the door opens and a girl sticks her head in the store and asks, "Have you got cigarettes?"
Bob gapes at her, can barely stammer out the word, "No." The girl scowls, goes away. The irony is so pointed that Bob and I just stare at one another, speechless. This is, after all, an organic foods store, clearly marked, unmistakable for what it is, the antithesis of the "Sleeper" setting—exactly what director Woody Allen had in mind as an object of satire. Like a spontaneous dovetailing of ideas or a direct comment, conjured up by—what? Our conversation? A universe with a sense of humor? Mere chance, nothing more?
2. I see an ad on television for the VHS-DVD issue of Robert DeNiro's movie "Ronin." As when it first came out, the movie's title is a mystery to me and I wonder what it means, but for some reason I don't bother to look it up in the dictionary. Then later that same evening, I'm reading Kim Stanley Robinson's alternate history epic The Years of Rice and Salt, and lo there's a speech by a Japanese sailor who describes himself as "a ronin, a warrior without a tribe." Hey, thank you Kim Stanley!
Fast-forward a year and a half: I'm reading through my notes to put this book together, combing for examples of how coincidences from the past often connect with the present in a strange wormhole-like manner, and I come across this quirky little business with the word "ronin." It's not one of those past-present connections, but it's neat anyway and so I decide to include it in a list format I have in mind for the opening chapter. So later that same evening, I'm surfing through the TV channels at a friend's house and there's "Ronin" scheduled on the movie package my friend just happens to subscribe to. It's such a little coincidence, really, that most people probably wouldn't spend a millisecond thinking about it, but then I turn to CNN and there's a news report about a huge car crash in Fresno, California—and how funny that this morning, the same morning I came across my old notes about the "ronin" thing, I had also read notes I'd written up two years ago about a chain of coincidences involving a big car crash in Fresno, California!
What just happened here? Did I invoke something? Did these events rise up out of the past, come back to life somehow, in response to my focus on them? Or am I just noticing patterns that mean nothing outside of the fact that I'm inclined to notice patterns?
3. My friend Kay tells me this story: Her teenaged daughter has been staying overnight several times a week at a girlfriend's house in a nearby hamlet, where that family had recently moved. For some reason, Kay starts having recurring nightmares that this friend's house catches fire and burns to the ground while her daughter is in it. These dreams (understandably) distress Kay so much that whenever her daughter is at the friend's house, Kay sets her alarm for 2 or 3 A.M., dials the family's phone number and lets it ring until somebody answers and Kay hangs up. "You know, so if there's a fire, they'd see it," she tells me. "I don't do things like that, but those dreams are too real! I even see the front of the house fall over in flames! Do you blame me for making those calls?"
Well, I certainly don't. Two weeks after Kay confesses this little transgression of manners to me, her daughter is staying overnight at the girlfriend's place and the house next door burns to the ground! No one was home, and no one was injured in the fire, which was discovered by a passing motorist at 12:30 A.M. And according to news reports, the front of the house did indeed fall over, engulfed in flames, exactly as Kay had seen it happen, night after night, in her dreams.
So what does this mean? That Kay saw what was going to happen because the fire might endanger her daughter, sleeping next door? Did her protective instincts prowl into the near future and send back a warning, though slightly off-target, of trouble to come? Or is this just a coincidence, meaning nothing in itself, since mothers everywhere worry about their children even when, as is usually the case, no bad things happen to them?
4. I'm looking over my checkbook and come to the rueful conclusion that I'm going to be a tad short of money this month. Obviously, I need to do something about this, but instead of going out and looking for a job like a normal person, I pretend that money comes to me in some unforeseen way. I do this by imagining myself walking down to my mailbox, opening up the mailbox, pulling out an envelope, opening the envelope—all this in as much detail as I can muster—and finding therein a check for an amount that covers my temporary deficit. I run through this imaginary scenario once or twice, and then, typical of me, I get involved with something else and the whole unpleasant matter slides right out of my head.
Next morning I walk down to the mailbox, open it up, and pull out an envelope with a return address from a small online bookstore that carries hardcover copies of my book, Dreaming Myself, Dreaming a Town, by now at least five years out of print. Inside the envelope is a check for an amount that very nicely and then some covers my "temporary deficit," as I'd so optimistically described it to myself. How about that! I hadn't heard anything from this bookstore in a long time and I'd consciously forgotten the deal with my book; we have no formal royalty payment schedule, no semi-annual reports, nothing like that at all. The check just—arrived. By chance? By ESP? This isn't the first time I've noticed that coincidence and precognition are often intertwined. On the other hand, maybe my unconscious keeps better track of book sales than I do. Or had my imagination influenced this somehow? Had I nudged myself into an event (the earned royalties, the check's precise timing) that from yesterday's perspective had been one of infinite possibilities in a wideopen universe?
Of course there are millions of people out there imagining like crazy that they'll win the lottery whenever they spend that proverbial dollar. So why doesn't it work every time? If anything "works" at all, in those terms. Are the hits just numerical probabilities, meaningless in themselves? Or is there something else going on here, some combination of these explanations that simply hasn't occurred to us to consider?
5. My childhood best friend Evelyn calls me up one evening in late July. We've lived fifty-some miles apart for most of our adult lives and haven't seen or talked with one another in a while, but as always there's a strong, almost mystical connection between us. As we gab, it becomes clear to me that Evelyn is in the throes of some serious emotional troubles. She is what you might call fixated on the idea of talking everyone she knows into moving to Myrtle Beach, the oceanside resort in South Carolina, where she's decided she wants to relocate with all her friends and relatives. "We'd all be together where it's warm," she says. "None of us would ever be alone." In the course of our conversation, she mentions this Myrtle Beach idyll probably half a dozen times.
Mixed with this, we also talk about the summers she and I spent as teenagers with my parents on Keuka Lake, in New York's Finger Lakes region, a setting we used to fantasize as the perfect afterlife, if there was one to be had, with various choice friends included—similar to Evelyn's current dream, actually, though I don't say this (our old fantasy comes to my mind as she talks). Now a mere fifteen-minute drive from my house, Keuka seems more distant than it was all those years ago, when it took a couple hours to get there in our overloaded station wagon, Ev and me riding in the back with our feet hanging out the window, laughing at everything, carefree as the wind. Thus I certainly know how it feels to long for something unattainable, as Evelyn's Myrtle Beach so plainly exemplifies. There's nothing I can do for her but listen, and commiserate. We talk for hours.
Next morning I relate this conversation to my friend Dave, who then suggests in his own commiserly way that we take his boat over to one of the state parks on Keuka Lake and go out for a sightsee—would I like that? I sure would, and we arrive there early enough so there's hardly any activity on the lake and nobody at the launch site at all, most unusual for summer. As we're getting the boat ready to put in the water, I notice a large colorful towel that somebody's left behind on the pier. It looks fairly new and clean, so I pick it up. On it is a lush tropical scene with the words MYRTLE BEACH in big, happy letters!
The impact this has on me in the moment, as I stand there staring at the towel, is almost impossible to describe. It's as if Evelyn's yearning has emerged into the scenery around me—the exact lake scenery she and I had discussed just the day before in specific regard to her Myrtle Beach dreams—to connect with me and tell me—what? Is there a message here, carried up from the depths in some ebb and flow of circumstance and timing, sent from her to me? Something engineered by the two of us; something that knew exactly where I'd be this morning, even though coming over here for a boat ride was spur-of-the-moment, the only conscious thought-progression from Ev's phone call to this place rising out of parallel efforts to console?
But that's ridiculous! It's just somebody's lost towel! You read Dear Abby letters all the time about people finding pennies with meaningful dates on them, and every time you think, Oh, come on. Talk about the "stupid power of personal involvement," as statisticians would say. Meaningless!
I kept the towel. As it turned out, its significance would accumulate, as a kind of harbinger of unconscious knowledge. Three years later, when Evelyn's husband called to tell me that she had died unexpectedly, I realized with sudden vivid clarity that I'd been looking at the Elmira paper's obituary page first thing every morning for months, expecting to see her name.
6. It's mid-June, 2004. I've sold my house and am mogging around in my new apartment, fussing with furniture arrangements, when for some reason, no obvious outward connection to anything, I start thinking about the day three or four years ago when I ran into a woman I'll call Lonnie at the county recycling center.
I had known Lonnie back in the seventies, when we'd both lived near Dundee, but hadn't seen her in at least twenty years, until that day at the recycling center, sometime in the early summer of 2000 or 2001. For no reason apparent to me, I remember the scene clearly: I was putting plastic jugs in a bin when a woman walked up to me and said, "Why, hello, Sue!" in a friendly tone—and I didn't know who she was at all. Could not place her. Not a clue. I just stood there and stared at her, caught completely off guard. Finally, she identified herself as Lonnie, and I was mortified at not recognizing her, though I don't know why I should have been, as we were mere acquaintances of occasional happenstance chat, separated by years and circumstance.
So here in 2004, I further recall that Lonnie and I had a pleasant conversation that day beside the plastics bin. She seemed genuinely interested in what I was up to, and asked about my writing. I hadn't seen Lonnie since then. Coming out of my reverie about it, I wonder what she's been up to herself these days.
Next afternoon, I walk downtown to the local pizza shop and order a take-out salad for dinner. As I'm waiting for it at the counter, someone's voice from behind me says, "Why, hello, Sue!" I turn around and see a woman standing there wearing a flowery top and tan pants. I don't recognize her at all. I have no idea who she is. Not a clue! But she's smiling in a friendly way, expecting a reply, and here I am caught flat-footed, how embarrassing. Then I notice she's wearing a name tag on her bodice—and it's none other than Lonnie!
I'm momentarily stupefied by this—by this what? Connection of thought, time, place, words? Then it flashes through my mind that this completely unexpected greeting situation is an almost exact duplicate of the one at the recycling center: her recognizing me right off, versus me not recognizing her at all. I manage to collect my thoughts enough to ask what she's up to these days and she explains she's a home health aide, lives in another county now, and commutes between various farflung jobs. Then she pays for her pizza and rushes out with a hasty byebye, and that's that.
I'm left with a very strange feeling, as if I'd accidentally come out in public wearing my pajamas. It isn't just that I had been thinking about her the day before running into her; I'd been thinking about the specific elements of our interaction (she: hello; me: huh?), and though logically you'd think my recollection should have helped me today, the exact setup of my not recognizing her had reoccurred. This is only the second time I've come in this particular restaurant and I can't remember if I'd planned on doing so yesterday, when the memory of Lonnie and me at the plastics bin had come into my head so vividly. I don't think so, but even if it had, it hardly makes a difference in the numberless factors that had to mesh for us to meet today, and in the particular choreography that mirrors our previous encounter so well.
A lesson in the efficacy of random thought? A remark from the universe on the subject of my people skills? Just a chance encounter attached to one of an infinite number of thoughts about anything I might have in a day? Except that this coincidence (as with all the others excerpted here from my records) carries a sensation of import with it, even if I can't exactly grasp what that import might be.
That's the thing about coincidence that is so intriguing, and not a little infuriating: it always seems to be about something, though what that something might be is often fleeting, whisked by in a blink of the inner eye. Moreover, coincidental events tend to act in smooth concert with precognition and an odd sort of clairvoyance, in which one's imagination (or imagined scenarios) is at the center of the coincidence cluster. Or, even more fascinating, the clusters can involve life elements that you're not consciously aware of at all. Some of these clusters are small and insignificant-seeming, of nothing more than momentary notice; others evolve into such complex mega-mind twisters of association and connection that they veer off into the infinite, if not the absurd.
Of course the conscious mind is always engaged in sorting through the complex clues and nonverbal data of everyday life, chugging along behind our physical perceptions. We see what we're looking at, and organize the data to make sense of things in a world that we choose to experience in linear fashion. Experience may not, in fact, be linear at all, but that is how we believe our senses operate, in a loose sort of agreement that makes our social systems possible (if not always successful), not to mention our personal daily reality. And yet, coincidence, like dreams (and possibly the only difference between the two is that one appears in the waking state; more on that later), doesn't operate in a vacuum. The connections are always personal, even on the largest mass-event scale (again, more on that later), and almost always reflect what you think is possible to begin with ... or they jar your idea of the possible with a certain disconcertingly gleeful irony. So who's making the joke?
(Continues...)
Excerpted from What a Coincidence! by Susan M. Watkins. Copyright © 2005 Susan M. Watkins. Excerpted by permission of Moment Point Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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