Coincidentally...

The other week I heard a feature on the radio about coincidences and it stuck in my mind. A Professor at Cambridge University is putting together a study/survey on the subject so that he can explore the scientific explanations, and it was clear from his interview responses that he thinks coincidences are just that: simultaneous chance occurrences.  I mean, he doesn’t believe that anything cosmic or fated or supernatural is going on.   So, people are sending him their remarkable coincidence anecdotes to go through, many of which are the kind that can make your spine tingle a little.  One memorable tale was from a woman who had bought an old framed painting from a junk shop whilst on holiday abroad.  Upon removing the frame later she found, stuffed into the back, a page from a decades-old British newspaper, and on that page was an article which, amazingly, included a photo of her as a child!  It just made me think: what are the odds?  Surely too slim to be just chance? - there must be some reason behind it!  She was meant to buy that picture…!  Why she was meant to, I don't know - presumably nothing significant happened because of it -  but it’s hard to engage the logical, prosaic part of my mind and just accept that there is nothing more to it than mere coincidence.

I think small coincidences happen quite often but we rarely remember them for long.  They also say if you're the kind of person who chats to strangers you'll notice them a lot - those odd moments when you strike up a conversation with someone in the seat next to you on a 'plane 1000 miles from home, for example, and it turns out that their brother-in-law lives in your street - that sort of thing. It's a small world ("but I wouldn't want to have to paint it" as comedian Steven Wright so neatly said). 

But I’m sure everyone experiences one or two that seem particularly significant and bizarre.  My most striking one was when I was about eleven, walking through a forest with my family during a day trip and talking about my latest interest in penfriends.  I was already writing to children in Australia and Kenya and I’d now decided I wanted a penpal from Jamaica - that was what we were discussing (I was a fan of exotic-sounding countries...)  As we followed the track between the trees something small and colourful caught my eye in the dry leaves underfoot.  I bent down to get a closer look and found it was a postage stamp, of all things, and not only that  –  it was a Jamaican one.  What were the chances of there being a Jamaican stamp  in the middle of that forest on the rare occasion that I was there at all, on that path, talking about the subject at the very moment I came to it?  It’s a weird one.

The man on the radio talked about probability and it seems that what most think of as extraordinary is often quite commonplace – e.g. apparently there is such a thing known as the ‘birthday problem’ in maths; that if you put a group of twenty-three people in a room, there is a 50/50 chance that two of them will share a birthday. Something in me struggles with the idea that, with 365 birthdays to choose from, two out of twenty-three in a random group would ever be the same.  

Other coincidences that were discussed resonated strongly and no doubt do so for most people – such as all those times when you find yourself thinking about somebody and they phone/turn up/text etc. at that exact moment.  I can’t help liking the notion that some form of telepathy exists and that, if transmitters can send invisible radio and TV signals, then surely - with all the electricity in our brains and the complexities within our grey matter that science still cannot fully explain – it’s not totally implausible for us to be able to transmit and receive basic thought-waves/energy?  Or perhaps that’s just wishful thinking.  Who knows?  Am I thinking about you right now?