When we look at these kind of surprise coincidences, every time something happens that is just like “Wow, what a coincidence.
How could these two independent things completely align in a way that is very surprising?” In the big city I run into somebody I know personally, or two things just end up in the same place at the same time for no apparent reason.
And it almost has like a feeling of magic to it, like “Wow, that’s outside what I would ever expect to happen.” But maybe we shouldn’t be so surprised when coincidences happen.
Still it’s always fun and gives a sense of magic to the world when we see them, because in my view of what magic is, it’s anything that is outside what we can comfortably explain in a way that makes sense for us.
So it doesn’t mean that it’s really “supernatural”, outside the natural world, simply something that we can’t explain as part of the natural world.
So whenever we have these kind of surprise coincidences, it brings out that feeling of the magic that is always there.
But when we look at these kind of rare events, these surprise coincidences, when we are looking for a particular thing to happen, it seems like it’s very rare.
That this particular coincidence would happen, that’s a long shot, that any particular combination of events would happen at any time.
Each of those is a long shot, a very rare event, and when you get that coming together, two rare events, then you really have something that is a surprise coincidence.
But even though every particular coincidence is a surprise and very unlikely and rare, overall there’s just so many things happening.
At any one moment, there are just so many different things going on together that rare events are happening all the time.
So I like to be reminded of this kind of way of looking at things, because it’s easy to get stuck in a sense of predictability, where we kind of expect there to be a certain range of events, and this is the way the world works, and this is what can be expected to happen.
But then something happens that’s outside that range of what we expect, and we get all surprised about it.
Now, if we’re sitting on one particular event and waiting for it to happen, it might never happen as long as we’re looking for it.
And it would just seem like “Wow, that is such a rare event, and it’s never going to happen.” But if we simply step back and look for anything rare to happen: what if we’re ready for a rare event to happen in any way? Then it seems rare events are not so rare, and coincidences are all over the place.
If you have a one-in-a-billion event, and you’re waiting on that one-in-a-billion event to happen, you might be waiting forever.
After all, even a billion seconds is over 30 years, so one in a billion, it would be a long time to wait for that to happen.
But on the other hand, there’s just so many billions of things happening at any one moment, so that there are one in a billion events happening all the time.
So when it comes to these kinds of rare and surprising things, I just like to look at it as a reminder to always be ready for unusual and rare things to happen.
The trick is that they tend not to happen in the way that we expect, in the way that we’re looking for, waiting for but they are always happening.
So one way or another one in a million, one in a billion, all these extremely improbable events, they seem to be happening all around us, and it’s just up to us to choose to become aware of them if we can, and maybe just open ourselves to the possibility that things can happen that are very rare, surprising, coincidental.
And as much as any particular rare event is rare, these rare surprises are everywhere around us.
#coincidences #rareevents #oneinabillion