Fun Along the Way (Revised)

The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everyone rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.

(Alan Watts)

I was returning to my office from lunch break and had to wait at a red light. I thought I would have a little fun looking at license plates for any spiritual messages and the usual affirmations were passing by. Suddenly a car showed up with a license plate carrying the letters MARION. “Odd”, I thought to myself, “Marion works in London and to my recollection we are not scheduled to work on anything together.” I crossed the street and was just about to enter the building when I felt a vibration. It was a calendar update on my phone. You can imagine my surprise when I saw that Marion was planning a trip over to Boston and had sent me an invite to meet!

Serendipities like this are really little energy boosts. They are nods from the Way to remind us that we are always connected. I started my spiritual quest because my scientific mind wanted answers when I first encountered synchronicity. The principle of Oneness just didn’t want to go into my scientific head until I saw all the evidence for myself. Later, I felt it was my mission to write about these metaphysical oddities given that I had a PhD in economics and professionally specialized in pattern recognition. If anyone had a shot not to be ‘Fooled by Randomness’—to turn Nassim Taleb’s popular scientific assertion on its head—it should be me. That was how my first book, ‘The Magnificent Experiment’ was born. I have moved on in the meantime though. Everything is connected, people as well as events. It is a fact that I have verified for myself, but it is natural to ask then, what do we do with this insight? 

Not surprisingly, as we discover these new-found metaphysical powers, we want to use them. Well-timed market calls, auspicious lottery ticket purchases, and whatever else it is that our fickle mind comes up with. Maybe some of us can bend the workings of the Universe at their will, but I quickly stopped trying. The reason why I started out with this story, there was absolutely nothing material that came of it. This story is about having a little fun with synchronicity and knowing what truly matters in life, spending time with people we care about. Allan Watts summed it up well, the meaning of life might just be to be alive, and to have fun with it!