Chapter 39.5: Coincidences and ESP

A friend sent me an email talking about how he seemed compelled to pick up a copy of a magazine he didn't normally read. It had nothing to do with what he does for a living, at least not directly, but he flipped through the pages and finally discovered what it was that "must" have called out to him as he passed the racks. A person he knew from college 20 years ago was quoted and photographed for the article. In his email, my friend discussed other coincidental moments that have occurred to him and openly asked if he had ESP.

I replied that it was coincidence, not ESP. What's missing from his thinking is the countless times a person sees something that he wasn't thinking of recently. You scan the TV pages to determine which rerun you want to fall asleep to, see Law & Order, flip to it, and it's an episode you haven't thought of in a few years, if you've even seen it before. You watch Briscoe make some wisecrack and soon slip off into dreamland with a cat nuzzling your ear or your heel dangling off the couch. And you never think of it again.

My point is, people remember the things they were thinking about when they pop up again. "Wow, I was just thinking of that episode of Gilligan's Island the other day, the one where Ginger gets all snuggly with the professor... Whodathunk that while flipping channels I'd run into just that episode?" But you're not thinking of all the other old movies, the episodes of Northern Exposure, that Roma Downey as an angel show, and some Robert Downey Jr. film that crossed your brain too but didn't pop into your television viewing schedule.

I used to do the same thing with digital watches. It always seemed that I looked at my watch right around the change of a minute. 58 seconds after the minute, 59, double zero, maybe 01 or 02. It seemed uncanny. Then I did the math: If I allow those five seconds of time to be significant, I have a 1 in 12 chance of catching one of those seconds. Odds aren't that tough at that point. Now, if I always seemed to catch the clock at 43 seconds into the minute, exactly ... well, even then it's one in 60.

My friend is a reporter and editor. It's odd that he saw the person he knew in the magazine, but I said, "Think of all the times you've looked at a magazine and NOT found someone you knew. You're a man of the world. You've covered hundreds of events, interviewed more than a thousand people. You're may be more likely to see someone you know than most readers. Even then, how often do you recognize a person?"

I don't want to blow the little ESP fantasy, because I do believe that some people are more sensitive to changes and patterns than others, and he may indeed be one of them. I subscribe to logic: there's usually a reason things happen. Science backs lots of unlikely, otherwise incomprehensible things -- black holes, time warps, moebius strips, the square root of negative-one.

It's one of the reasons this whole "intelligent design" thing pisses me off. I believe that God exists. I believe that he created us all and the universe, etc. I don't think he did it a minute ago in geological time. I think he created the Big Bang, like he was flicking on the lights, and said, "Wow, I haven't looked in here yet. Let me check this out for a little while." And as God explores, the universe keeps expanding. Naive, I know. But if it's with the eyes of a child that one enters the kingdom of heaven, then I'm going to keep my childish thoughts alive as long as I can.

There's more going on in the world than our eyes can see. If you you have ESP, I'm not going to tell you you're wrong. And I still believe in ghosts even though I've never seen one. But that's another story...