Sunday, 14 April 2019

Coincidence and the Universe.

Back in the months of May and June 2017 I developed three conditions:

1. I gave myself a hernia bringing a badly overgrown hedge back to a semblance of order.
2. My legs started aching badly when I strode out on a walk, which made my rural perambulations a matter of duty rather than pleasure. (And having come and gone, come and gone, now it’s getting worse than ever.)
3. The timing of subsequent symptoms would suggest that my cancer started growing about then.

Two other factors also landed on my plate during those two months: The much-esteemed bringer of light finally left my orbit and shut the door behind her, and a goblin entered my life by way of replacement.

That’s an interesting coincidence, and in a recent episode of House his patient happened to be a priest who said: ‘Coincidences are God’s way of giving you a message.’ Replace ‘God’ with ‘the universe’ and I might be tempted to give the concept a reasonable level of credence. But here’s the problem:

If the universe does give us messages – and the mysterious nature of existence allows that it just might – then I wish it would be a little more specific in its utterances. Universal ‘messages’ are a bit like Chinese pictograms; they can mean different things according to the context. When the context is life itself, there’s very little hope of being able to interpret them.

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