Weird coincidences keep happening to me. My buddy, who is a math teacher, says it is all just the mathematical odds playing out.
I’m not always so sure.
Do you think the universe reveals things to us serendipitously, or are the things that happen to us just due to mathematical chance?
Weird Coincidence #1
I was talking to my buddy as we often do (Not the math teacher buddy, but a different guy). We talk about all things, big and small.
On one particular day, he was telling me about a time when he was younger. He had picked up a pizza. He had carried it home under his arm like you would carry a book. Of course, the toppings all slid off the pizza. He folded it in half and made a panzerotti.
Until now, I had only ever seen a pizza carried this way once in my life. I saw a boy on his bike pick up a Little Caesar’s pizza and sling it under his arm. Vertically.
So at this point in the story, I had encountered a pizza being carried vertically or heard a story about it, twice in my entire life (that I can remember).
The very next day after I heard the story, my family and I drove to a microbrewery/restaurant that was about an hour and a half drive from our house. After we paid the bill my wife laughed an pointed out a grown man holding his takeout pizza under his arm vertically.
Okay, math people, what are the odds? The odds I would see this the day after my friend’s story? The odds I would even be in this town in the first place? The odds that a grown man wouldn’t know how to properly hold a pizza?
I can’t believe this was a coincidence, but I also can’t imagine why the universe would want me to take notice of something so seemingly insignificant.
Thoughts, anyone?
It goes way deeper than mathematical odd or chance, it’s a rare Earthly event called “the leaning slice of Pizza”.
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Ha ha. I knew I had heard of it before.
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This sort of thing happens to me fairly often. It’s not always as striking as your pizza example, though. Sometimes it just seems to be a matter of life organizing itself thematically.
For example, you and I started talking about the nature of reality right around the same time that one of the characters in my current work in progress was wrestling with the question of how to know what is real. In fact, that’s an emerging theme of the WIP … but, I swear, it was *already* emerging before our online conversation.
What causes this is an interesting question. I think I could write 1,000 – 2,000 words about it. Would it be OK with you if I did so and linked back to this post?
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Yes, please feel free. These happen to me all the time, so I’m going to make it a series.
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Awesome. Maybe I can have it up by next week.
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Specifically, the odds are N!(N – A)!/P where P is the total population, N is the number of people that like to fold their pizzas and A is a coefficient used to take into account dark matter and yetis…
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Synchronicities. They happen to me all the time. I suppose a room full of mathematicians could come up with odds or even an algorithm. You see John Nash trying to formulate an algorithmic approach to pigeons gathering in A Beautiful Mind.
I could answer you using CT’s material but, you probably wouldn’t believe me.
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Doesn’t John Nash turn out to be nuts in the end?
I’d love to hear the CT explanation.
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He was schizophrenic but, learned how to distinguish between real & fantasy.
CT’s investigations into the human condition via his healing practice & research into the Akashic revealed that there are no accidents or coincidences. Everything in your life is planned out (it’s where the predestination thing comes from in some religious texts). Murder isn’t random. It’s pre-planned between two souls. One soul agrees to ‘murder’ the other one for the experience for both. And, as this is a free will Universe, said plan to murder can be stopped or re-negotiated. All ‘meetings’ are planned in advance & can be changed at the last minute.
The only seemingly random things that can happen are when a soul deviates from a life path. The ultimate wake-up call that you aren’t doing what you should for yourself is cancer. Cancer can be caused by external factors such as nuclear accidents but, that would be a planned event and a soul’s choice for experience or…a group of souls will agree to go thru an accident like that to call attention to all the other souls that, maybe, nuclear power is not such a good thing. Either way, cancer, out of the blue, is the soul’s last ditch effort to ‘get your attention’ and follow your intended path.
Am I making sense?
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Thanks for sharing. It’s interesting. Based on what I currently think I know, it doesn’t make sense, but that doesn’t mean it’s wrong. I really need to invest some time in looking at the material.
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The explanation that I’ve heard before is that you’re “looking for it”. You probably saw 1 person carry it vertically and thought it was strange, but then the next time you saw it, you didn’t pay too much attention. Your brain normalized it and didn’t store it in its memory. It was nothing special. However, now that you’ve been talking about carrying a pizza vertically, your brain was on alert.
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I considered that, but I think I would’ve noticed a pizza being carried that way no matter what. It is so unusual. It would be like seeing someone carry an umbrella upside-down.
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An umbrella upside-down? What’s wrong with that?
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Lol. It’s bad luck.
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Is it? I had no idea.
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Only if it is indoors.
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It’s all “synchronicity.” Carl Jung, my hero. These things happen to me all the time. After I commented yesterday on your “bait” post, and I mentioned Jonathan Swift eating children, Fox News had a clip of this crazy women (maybe seriously mentally ill, so maybe not funny–or a plant to make AOC look like the crazy woman she is at her speaking event), saying the Green New Deal was not enough and we had to start eating babies! Seemed synchronistic to me. Your reference to Soylent Green and my carrying it further to bring up Swift. So when this happens, I always tune in to see (usually) how it will inform my fiction writing–without synchronicity my books wouldn’t go the way they do.
Jung first promoted this idea and I am certain it has to do with Einstein’s theory that all time, past, present, future, happen at once and we have a misconception of Time, with capital T. Jung believed it was part of the paranormal and had a huge influence on our mental functioning. I agree with him. I think it was part of both Einstein’s and Jung’s attempt to reconcile science and “religion” or things not explained by either.
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The AOC baby-eating/Green Deal thing was definately weird.
I have learned a lot about Einstein but not much about Jung.
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