Have you ever had a time, or times, in your life when there seemed to be far more “coincidences” happening. Or times when those common oddities in your life seem to be coming at you in bunches that are just too much to be considered “normal” anymore?
I’ve had this kind of thing happen to me at least a few times over the course of my life where an abundance of these kinds of days stand out enough for me to remember. The first time that I remember this happened around 1996 when for weeks and maybe into months I noticed all kinds of numbers in sequence, perhaps on a digital clock, or a license plate, of some kind of other way. Another thing that stood out was that I kept seeing New Mexico showing up in some kind of way, mostly license plates, but also on T.V., or some other kind of unusual way. I was living in California and I had been working in the same job for over 11 years. A coworker of mine was Wiccan and he told me that he had learned that when we are living our lives in accordance with Universal principals, or something like that, that these things are “supposed” to happen. It was years before I embraced any semblance of spirituality so that seemed like just so much fu-fu nonsense to me. Still, within a year I was living in New Mexico.
The next time it happened was circa 2000 when I was getting sober and, oh-my-God were the “coincidences” popping off with abundance. By then I had read somewhere that, not only was this a sign from the “Universe” that I/we are on the “right” path, but that they would remain greater gifts if not talked about as if we were special for getting them by spouting off about them like they were our own secret and special jewels to anyone who would listen. So then, with that said, allow me to share some things that have happened recently in this regard, he said, tongue in cheek. Keep in mind these are not earth-shattering by any means, but just a sampling of approximately the past 24 hours of maybe a month of weird or coincidental things that have happened.
But first allow me to lay a foundation for what follows. One of the challenges that I’ve had with Diana is that many of the things that she does defies logic, much less good sense, to me. Unfortunately I am “condemned” to need to make sense of the world. Since I have known her she has taken the position that she not only does she want to live by less logic and rational thinking and more intuitively in her life. She believes that this is a big part of her spiritual journey. She believes that out relationship will be so much better if I can learn to do this as well. I have felt like this is just the opposite of what will constitute a healthy relationship. To make it is an even bigger challenge since I have cultivated a very rational and logical approach to life and this has been a boon to my life both professionally and personally. Well, personally up until I met Diana. However I have gotten a lot “better”, if you can call it that, at suspending logic when it comes to some of the confounding things that she does. Trust me when I tell you that this is not the “typical” gender difference confusion. There is defiantly some of that infused in all of this, but there is more to it for sure.
To confuse matters more there are the normal language and culture differences that we have to work through when communicating, which is exacerbated by the logical breakdown and subsequent upset caused by these things. So we were going through one of these episodes and it caused a bit of a rift between us and I was spinning around sleeplessly trying to figure out exactly what happened and how to prevent it from happening in the future when I realized it was this problem of me needing to make sense of what does not make sense to me. But certainly there have been plenty of times where I come to find out that the fault was in my logic and not just the “logic” of the situation writ large.
So while I have made some gains in accepting less logic in my life and in particular with my wife I realized that I was simply hurting both of us by not being even more flexible in that regard. So, after laying in bed some hours trying to sort this out I finally came to a conclusion at maybe 1 or 2 A.M. I decided to myself to work on being less logical and rational. Believe me when I tell you that it is difficult for me to even write those words, much less put them into practice. Then, as if I needed confirmation that I had made a good decision a couple hours later in the dead of night a set of two lights in the room turned on and would not go off by light switch. I had to unscrew the light bulbs in order to turn them off.
The next morning we made amends and after breakfast I headed out on my daily 45 minute ride to treatment on my motorcycle, which was out of gas, but, I thought, still had reserve tank left to get me to the gas station only a couple miles away. Instead it turned out that I had been riding on the reserve since at least the last fill-up and was completely out of gas. I had just passed the neighbor a minute ago and so I left the bike where it was and jumped off in the hope that he would still be around and maybe have some gas in a can somewhere. Confusing my Spanish and Italian I asked him for “gasolina” and he shrugged his shoulders since there is no such word in Italian. I gave him what I’m going to believe is the universal hand gesture for pumping gas into a tank and he said “Oh, benzina” “Si! Benzina!” I said. Ok, so, not that big of a deal as far as these things go but still very lucky and more to the point just another in a serious of unusual stuff happening.
I went to treatment where, in addition to the infusions that the doctor is giving me he is also providing me with a new treatment for the lymphedema that I got as a result of the radiation treatment in 2019 where the muscles all around my neck are like steel bands and almost always painful. The treatment includes a special cream on my neck followed by a hand-held laser, which necessarily is moved back and forth so as not to burn the skin. My doctor is a fine fellow but often times has the-morning-after-smell of a man who likes to get his drink on in no small way. In other words, dude is an alcoholic.
His assistant was out and he was so busy that it prompted me to go through the trouble of translating the statement “You seem very busy. Maybe we should skip the neck treatment today”. He didn’t like that idea and after waiting around for far too long it was finally my turn for him to get to working on me. Soon his cell phone rang and as he was talking on it I noticed my neck heating up. When I get this treatment I need to look away from the laser because of potential injury to the eye so it was out of the corner of my eye and with a burning neck that I realized he wasn’t moving the laser. Naturally I started moving my neck while sorting out in my mind how I was going to get out of there tactfully if this continued. So I kept moving my neck and luckily a major laser-fry of my neck was averted.
Keep in mind that none of this rises to the level of something that I think is worthy of mentioning at any given time. So, bear with me. Next Diana came home talking about how she had been trying to get through to a particular office and she spent a combined couple hours trying to get through. She mentioned it to a friend and he got through immediately…twice! So she just mentioned this tiny bit of weirdness in passing but added that there seem to be many of these kinds of small coincidental oddities happening to her lately.
Shortly after that I saw what I thought were macadamia nut cookies in the fridge, which happen to be my favorite cookie and nut, which I have never even brought up because, why would I? I haven’t even seen them here and didn’t know if they are even available. Unfortunately for me they were just strange little pieces of bread.
So I went back to binge watching The Office as we had been for maybe 10 hours or so the past week and I made an off-handed comparison between two of the female characters, those being Pam and Karen, if you care. Karen had been on the show for probably 10 or so episodes before I made this comparison and moments after I said something another character, Kevin, made that comparison almost down the exact lines I had just done. Moments after that Michael decides that he is going to give gift baskets to clients that the office had lost in order to get them back. Included in the basket, he said, were macadamia nut cookies. At that point I mention to Diana for the first time that those where my favorite cookie and nut.
This is where things got weird enough for me to want to write out this blog post. She became very animated and had to pause the program to tell me this story about how she had tasted one macadamia nut about a year ago, decided she like it and then went out of her way to go find some, organic, of course. She finally found some but then after she ate a couple for some reason she decided that she didn’t like them after all and so they sat for months until she finally threw them away. Then, some months later, in a way that was so weird that she emphasized that she was compelled by some strange force that she couldn’t begin to understand and struggled with that she had to buy them. These sat around for months until she recently moved out of the place she had been living for some years a few months ago. When she moved she said that she threw out all kinds of things, including foods she hadn’t eaten, but for some reason didn’t throw out the nuts.
Meanwhile, since I have mixed nuts daily with my breakfast grains I have been cracking nuts for some months now but ignoring the mysterious round nuts, not knowing what they were, having never seen the shell of a macadamia nut. Now I was delighted to have a whole bucket of those yummy nuts in front of me as she told me this strange little story.
Then a friend who I hadn’t thought of for over half a year who I had just thought about calling the night before texted me to see how I was doing. I know that we’ve all had that experience but put together with all the rest of this within a 24 hour period fits in pretty nicely.
So then, is it me, or is something in the air at this weird point in time?