The sun rises every morning. I do not rise every morning, but the variation is due not to my activity, but to my inaction. Now, to put the matter in a popular phrase, it might be true that the sun rises regularly because he never gets tired of rising. His routine might be due, not to a lifelessness, but to a rush of life.
The thing I mean can be seen, for instance, in children, when they find some game or joke that they specially enjoy. A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun, and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon.
It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we. (paragraph breaks added)
Source: Orthodoxy, GK Chesterton
No, it isn’t that surprising ’cause when you are looking, say, for a new brand of car, it’s all you see. Your brain would have run right over the book title, if you hadn’t lodged the title of the book in your memory for you to trip over!
But it IS fun to have happen.
Apparently, according to my psychic sister, it means you are in the right place at the right, in the universe.
Barbara – Well, I’m glad I’m in the right place/time. It feels as if I had a message from my grandmother . . .
As if she’d reached out and taken your hand. Nice.
Barbara – Yes.
I remember loving the dove in the eagles nest as a young teenager. Amazing it had language like that.
Not sure I’d tackle it today.
I love random connections such as you found!
Lorna – Great! I’ll mail it to you!
In “The Celestine Prophecy” James Redfield claims that there’s no such thing as coincidence.
Jim T
Jim – Only happenstance or enemy action, per Aurie Goldfinger? I think it might be as simple as Barbara’s observation, that I’d have blown past that book title if I hadn’t just made a fuss about it.
Purely by coincidence — ahem — I ran across this quotation from Vance Morgan, who has a blog called “Freelance Christianity”:
“To persons who pay attention to such things, synchronous events often feel like much more than coincidence—they feel more like the universe is either confirming or is trying to tell us something.
Such connections, as Jung tells us, are made primarily in the mind of the observer. If I choose to see two unrelated but similar events as connected in some meaningful way, then they are meaningfully connected. ”
Jim T
Jim – That seems right to me. It’s the human mind that invests things with meaning: both a tremendous strength and (sometimes) a fatal weakness in the way we think and interact with the world.