Yesterday evening as I was driving home on the 5 freeway, I happened to tune in to a traffic report on the radio. Just as the announcer said "...multiple-car collision", the car next to me in the left lane collided into the rear of the car in front.
One might argue that this is a more 'serious' synchronistic event/coincidence than the usual verbal ones and therefore more impressive, and that would be true in a sense (although in another, more cosmic sense I don't know if there really is any difference), but at the same time I must confess it doesn't carry the same emotional zing, for some reason.
Is it less special because I've witnessed traffic accidents before? Or because this event was more 'public' than the verbal coincidences, in the sense that anyone in the vicinity who happened to be listening to the same broadcast would have shared in the experience, making it less personal and unique?
On the other hand, I sincerely hope this doesn't herald the beginning of an ominous new trend in the nature of the coincidences I may witness in the future. Just to be safe, I should take care never to read about plane crashes or hijackings while flying, for example, or talk about food-poisoning or terrorist bombings while dining out, etc.^
Say, maybe I SHOULD talk about (friendly)aliens landing on the White House lawn or scientific proof of magic... who knows?^ And why stop there? What about the immortality pill, cold fusion, world peace, women suddenly throwing themselves at my feet...
EDIT: Hmm... those last two paragraphs might well be summed up as 'Like attracts like' or 'Wishing/Worrying will make it so'; it seems that while musing on the serendipitous co-eventuation of acausally connected incidents in my own life, I may have stumbled onto the primitive basis of mankind's ubiquitous belief in sympathetic magic. Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, yet again.^
No comments:
Post a Comment