That is a Crazy
Coincidence!
“A coincidence is always worth noticing. You can always discard it later if it
proves to be only a coincidence,” (Agatha Christie). Life is full of large and sometimes unnoticeable
coincidences that can have different meanings to different people. Coincidences occur with numbers,
people, events, and even in nature.
We
truly live in a small world after all.
Everything is connected in some way or another. Frigyes Karinthy came up with an idea
called the Six Degrees of Separation.
This concept stated that everyone in the world is separated from
everyone else by six links, so that a chain of “a friend of a friend” statement
can be made to connect any two people in six steps. This idea of everyone being connected in some way is also
represented in an ancient Chinese myth.
It says that the gods have tied a red thread around every one of our
ankles and attached it to all the people whose lives we are destined to touch. This thread may stretch or tangle, but
it will never break.
Two
well-known people who were coincidentally connected in their lifetime are
Abraham Lincoln and John. F. Kennedy.
These two men had seven letters in their last name, studied law, were
born second children, served in the military, were boat captains, were elected
President in ’60, were elected to the House of Representatives in ’46, and had
four children, two of whom died before becoming a teen. When they were killed, they were both
shot in the head on a Friday, they were seated beside their wives when shot,
and Lincoln sat in Box 7 at Ford’s Theater and Kennedy rode in Car 7 in the
Dallas motorcade. Both assassins
used three names: John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harry Oswald. Booth shot Lincoln at a theater and was
cornered in a warehouse, and Oswald shot Kennedy from a warehouse and was
cornered in a theater. What’s the
likelihood of that happening?
People
seem to find many coincidences with numbers as well. Some people come across the same number many times
throughout their life, or have a “lucky number” that seems to show up at a
specific time or when they hope for it.
With Uri Geller, that number was always eleven. He thinks that eleven “represents a
positive connection and a gateway to the mysteries of the universe and
beyond.” An event in history where
this number coincidentally came up a lot was during the attacks on 9/11. 9 + 1 + 1 = 11, Afghanistan is eleven
letters long, September 11th is the 254th day of the
year: 2 + 5 + 4 = 11, after September 11th there are 111 days left
to the end of the year, and the first plane to hit the towers was flight 11.
Coincidences
can also be found in nature. From
certain shapes, such as a spiral, to a certain property of nature that allows
us to survive, these concurrences are surrounding us all. A famous cosmologist, Sir Fred Hoyle, realized that the
particular level of an energy transition in the carbon atom facilitated the
creation of carbon in massive stars.
If this energy level were slightly different, by less than a percent,
carbon could not be created in the standard cycle in massive stars. Carbon could not exist, and so biology
could not exist as we understand it.
Is this a coincidence?
With a large enough sample size, many odd coincidences
are likely to happen. Some people
find it astonishing that there are more than 16 million others on the planet
who share their birthday.
Everyday, events are happening in people’s lives that cause them to
question their true meaning. Was
that dream just a coincidence?
Does that number have a deeper meaning? Does life have a certain purpose, or is it all just a crazy
coincidence?
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