I try to follow my intuition at all times. If my gut doesn't tell me what to do, then I know something is wrong. Usually it's that I don't have enough information to make a good decision.
I think this is why I love coincidences so much. I suppose whether coincidences are actually meaningful in any way is a mystery, but how do you explain that strange and unique feeling you get in your heart when they happen? When you notice a coincidence, your reaction is unlike any other. Are the events in our life ultimately objective or subjective?
In Psalm 46 of the King James Bible, published in the year that Shakespeare turned 46, the 46th word is "shake" and the 46th word from the end is "spear." Isn't that WEIRD?!
I choose to believe that when a coincidence invades my life -- large or small -- I'm in the right place at the right time. It's a kind of signpost. I first encountered (and became mildly obsessed with) this theory of synchronicity after I read James Redfield's book, The Celestine Prophecy. It's easy to make a good decision when a coincidence occurs because that's the purpose of coincidence: to point us in the right direction. There's something there I need to take advantage of. Every time you turn towards something, you turn away from something else. But how do you best decide which way to turn? Some people think I'm crazy for not thinking through my options more thoroughly, but usually my thought process is subconscious. My intuition brings to light the decision I would arrive at anyway, after long, troublesome hours of contemplation. And I have never been steered astray by this gut of mine. What I've discovered is that the more often I take advantage of whatever coincidences have to offer, the more often coincidences happen to me. I'm living well. But if I ignore the signpost and let opportunity pass me by, then life just marches on like it always does. I want my life to be special, but that involves taking risks and chances and leaps of faith.
If there's even an inkling that "this might not be a good idea" in my mind, I won't do it. I hate regret because it makes you live sorrowfully in the past. This is not to say I have never made a bad or just plain wrong decision. But on those occasions, I learn from my mistakes and grow out of the experience. I choose not to dwell on the past and consider all the other myriad choices I could have made. What's done is done. That's a pet peeve of mine, when people can't let go of something they've done or someone else has done in the past. You can only affect the present, so if you're going to make any headway or solve any issue, you won't succeed by dwelling on what already transpired. You have to move ahead and fix the way things turned out -- and THAT is within your power. I hardly ever think about the way things might have been.
We all must agree, though, that everything happens for a reason. This is true of our world whether or not you choose to ascribe mystical significance to those reasons. In the end, everything is conditioned. Nothing is uncaused. Every action has a reaction, and the interaction of all action in the universe, while complex, is thus not chaotic. Everything is connected in a delicate balance.
All of this sets me up to discuss another topic at a later time: fate. If a coincidence is simply a confluence of events (events bumping into other events due to the complicated web of interaction in the universe), are they inevitably going to happen, or do we have a say in the matter? Could our own decisions be fated?
If you're interested, you can read more here:
http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200407/the-power-coincidence
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/ambigamy/200911/everything-happens-reason-simple-phrase-opens-worm-can-wonder
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