Photo: my husband Duane at the Duanesburg Diner in Duanesburg, NY. Coincidence...? I think not!
My husband and I used to joke about the time that we bought a Honda Element - a relatively uncommon car - and as soon as we did, we began to see Honda Elements everywhere! It's the same as when someone becomes pregnant, and all at once, there seem to be pregnant women wherever they look.
My son Josh, who lives in the Pacific Northwest, tells me he is finding circular references and themes in things he is working on. Is it a coincidence or a pattern emerging? He reminds me that he wrote a blog entry years and years ago (May 2004, to be exact) where his friend purchased a strawberry-rhubarb pie, which was relatively rare in Austin, Texas, and that they got to talking about this curious red celery plant. Then he starts a conversation with a random stranger on the bus to college the next morning who mentions that he recalls growing up on a farm where they loved the sour notes of gooseberry and... rhubarb. Later that same day, he is studying in a book about brain function and how contrasts "help the brain process more fully - like cooks combining sweet and sour, strawberry and rhubarb." The red celery, again.
Clearly, detecting patterns has helped humans to survive and thrive. Our early ancestors realized that things that occur in similar settings, have the same structure or color, or simply happen around the same time are connected in some way.
They found food that way, predicted the seasons, and mapped the stars. But have we lost that ability to divine predictions and decode paradigms? Now our food is collected from grocery stores where all we need is a list and a credit card, both of which we'd forget to bring if didn't carry them with us everywhere. Our seasons are little more than wardrobe changes because none of us needs to know the perfect date for planting or the ideal time to hunt for meat. Don't even get me started on GPS, which has rendered us completely clueless about reading maps or learning directions. So now, when we witness coincidences and detect similarities, we're weirdly taken aback.
Is it human nature to find things that are the same? Is it evolution that has faded our need to make correlations or de-evolution that's robbed us of a survival skill? Some scientists and researchers in psychiatry believe that there are forces out there that lead us to find these similarities. Others believe that there is a synchronicity that drives humans to seek out similarities between themselves and others: we have an instinctive need to connect with people. But only when we are open to looking.
When we started thinking of getting a Honda Element, we had subconsciously begun looking for that car wherever we went. Because we were open to seeing them; we didn't cause them to appear. They were there all along.
Makes me wonder: how many more things could we see if we were truly open to seeing them? If you start seeing Honda Elements or running into rhubarb - don't blame me, it's just your brain regaining lost abilities!
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