Coincidence? I Get That A Lot.
I was sending an email to a friend the night before last while listening to a podcast in the background. Wife was on the phone to her mother in the background and she happened to say the name of the best friend of the person I was mailing. As she did so, the podcaster says my name in relation to an email I had send them two weeks ago.
Weird, huh? Except no, because these things happen so often that they don’t surprise me.
In fact my life is part of a big coincidence.
My mother was one of three daughters whose father was in the armed forces and lived by a port.
My father was one of three brothers whose father was in the armed forces and lived by a port.
My mother’s sisters all had girls. Two years later, they all had boys.
The boys were all colourblind.
Two of those boys (me and one other) were born at the same time on the exactly same day on opposite sides of the world.
My dad gets them, too. We used to joke in my family that wherever we went in the world, my dad would meet people he knew. Once we were on a boat in between Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands when I was seven years old, and I said to my dad:
“OK, you haven’t seen anyone you know this holiday.”
Straight as fuck, he nodded ahead and said: “See that guy…”
And I thought he was kidding, but it was a guy he had shared a house with a couple of decades before, and the guy was working on the boat and he walked over and said an astonished hello to my dad, who didn’t seem all that surprised.
And that’s just one of an almost countless number of coincidences.
Like how, after living all around the world, I ended up going to university miles from anywhere, but on a campus which had once been the place where my Dad had been stationed in the Air Force.
There are many, many more, some too personal to go into out of respect for people (life and death stuff) and some I have written about here and here and here and here.
I don’t think everything happens for a reason - I’m not like that. I mean something caused it to happen, obviously, but the reason is ”there you go” rather than ”because”. If you start thinking everything happens for a reason, you’ll wonder what you did to deserve it when things go wrong, and that’s not thinking right.
So with these coincidences going on all the time, I assume nothing but “there you go”.
November 3rd, 2006 at 12:41 am
on coincidence - when i took my 10-year-old son and his 13-year-old sister to France, thought I’d better get them some French lessons before school started. Only one other parent there doing the same. We had been close friends in Sydney, 30 years earlier - and still are.
November 3rd, 2006 at 12:50 am
I recognized that about you early on- you jangle change.