What are the Odds

What are the Odds?

After a few things that have happened in my world over the last week or so, I found myself searching Google to see what it had to say about coincidence. A few of the results I found are the following:

Is coincidence really coincidence?

Is coincidence a fate?

There is no such thing as coincidence in the way that people think of it. Nothing just comes out of the blue with no reason. Everything is under natural law and has a cause or causes. Everything is fundamentally the manifestation of the will of some being.

A coincidence is a remarkable concurrence of events or circumstances that have no apparent causal connection with one another. The perception of remarkable coincidences may lead to supernatural, occult, or paranormal claims.

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“What are the odds?” is pretty much the catchphrase of coincidences, a coincidence is not just something that was unlikely to happen.

Narrowing my own coincidences down to the last twenty four hours; one is fairly typical of the every day kind of everything that we put down to coincidence. In my diary here yesterday I rambled on about a long distance event that Steve and I took a holiday in the USA to take part in. The California Man, same distance as Ironman races, 3800 swim (in a lake overlooked by Folsom Prison) 112-115 miles bike ride and a marathon run. We had a ball on that holiday, happy days.

Whilst writing about that I mentioned that we didn’t look that happy in the finish photo. Well when I was hunting for pictures to illustrate the yarn, Steve asked me what I was looking for and when I told him, he joined in the search until I called a halt after we had both wasted half and hour looking for said photo. It was not that important and we both forgot about it. Then this morning, after cutting out what will be a new a summer dress, from the pile of remnants I have bought over the years and stored in a cupboard. I looked through the pile of pretty print and plain material to see if there were any white pieces that would serve as a lining for the skirt section of my new dress. At the very bottom of the pile I saw the edge of a 10 x 8 photo and pulled it out to see what it was. Blow me down with a wing tip feather of a bald eagle, if it was not that very photo, nowhere near where our old race photos are kept. What are the odds?

The second is a bit different. After he and I had done our morning training that today consisted of one Tai Chi and two Qigong sessions followed by an hour on our turbo trainers watching a bit of the same old, same old TV news reports and then one episode of our old box set of West Wing, episode 19. All this was done at home due to what I keep on calling, ‘The Plague’.

After we were done with our fitness regime, we sat and had a coffee listening to the last part of Stephen Kings ‘If it Bleeds’. It’s a set of short stories and the last one, is a standalone sequel to The Outsider. I love Stephen King into tiny little bits and I have been going on a bit about the closeness of the current situation to Kingy's best book, as far as I am concerned, ‘The Stand’, the theme of which is an almost world ending virus that leaks from an American laboratory and kills almost everybody. New series of that will be coming up soon on TV.

So, as I was saying to Steve that there was another book that I had read when I was in, what, about my thirty’s, that was called The Plague written by Albert Camus. I read several of his books at about the same time, as you do when you really enjoy the first book you read by a new writer to you. Many years later I read The Diary’s of Albert Camus that was lent to me by a friend. In the casual coffee time gossip with Steve, I mentioned that it was also interesting that both Camus and King had written books, years apart, with the same title, The Outsider, also a great a TV series.

All of that is probably not coincidence but inspiration maybe. Yet, when Steve then, had a phone call from a client that he had moved out of his home in Paris last year, there was one. When he put the phone down he told me that the client had been writing about Albert Camus. Now that did made the hair on the back of my neck break out into a prickle. What are the odds?

I downloaded a photo of the cover of ‘If it Bleeds’. There is an image of a cat on the cover.

Here is my little cat Birdy.