One morning this week I went to the garage in search of a handful of food books I had stored away this past winter; amongst them “In Defense of Food” written by Michael Pollan in 2008. That afternoon (unrelated to my book search) I went to the bank to reset my debit card PIN that I had inexplicably forgotten more than a year ago. The next day I opened “In Defense of Food” to a page where I had inserted a piece of mail I was obviously using as a bookmark. The piece of mail was a ten-year-old notice from my bank providing me with my Personal Identification Number; the one I had forgotten. How? Why? Was the Universe talking to me? Laughing at me? Pelting me from afar with mocking, rotten omnipotence? Or was it truly just an amazing, magical coincidence? I suppose each individual is allowed their own interpretation for experiences such as this, but being the reasonable, spreadsheet sort of person I am, even though here in its immediate aftermath this has left me somewhat uncertain and flung-flustered, I am sure within a few days I will land on coincidence to explain this odd alignment of circumstance. A large part of the reason for this is if I chose a different interpretation, I might spend time and effort looking for unknowable, unfindable answers. Coincidence allows me to move on; to maintain productivity.
Random, lucky coincidence…
Random: there are far more variables in play than we are willing to acknowledge or consider, and chaos is the rule far more often than it is the exception.
Lucky: good or bad.
Coincidence: a layering of random luck.
I believe the reason this PIN number coincidence has me flung-flustered is because it is 100 percent random luck. As a human I like to believe that I have control; or if not me, some greater power. I am uncomfortable with anything I cannot grasp or explain. When relating this series of unlikely happenstance, I even had someone trying to give me credit for subconsciously remembering where that notification was and manifesting it by thinking about my PIN number outside the context of that bookmark. We tell ourselves and we like to believe that “because I did this, this happens.” The actual equation is. “because I did this and because this happened and because this happened and because this happened and because this happened and because this happened… (potentially ad infinitum), then this happened. It is easy for me to leave out all the “and because this happened” factors but it is difficult for me to leave out the “because I did this” factor…
…unless the “this that happens” is bad - then many (and perhaps most) of us jettison the “because I did this” factor and eagerly blame the “and because this happened…” factors.
But as a nation and as a culture, to explain the homeless or hungry or poor or any number of other unfortunate circumstances we revert back to the responsibility equation and tell those people “because you did THIS (fill in the blank), this happened.”
We tell ourselves and we like to believe…