The other day I had a conversation with a friend about premonitions. He’s not the sort of person I’d guess would have had experience with premonitions or would be comfortable talking about them. From a rationalist viewpoint, such experiences are usually not documented in any convincing way, nor are they reproducible, and so are easy to dismiss as faulty memory or imagination. Yet to people who have had premonitions or experienced telepathic communication or some other way of knowing that science can’t explain, the experiences are quite real and convincing.
I have tried to convince skeptics, but gave up that effort long ago. Instead, I find it’s better to just trust my own experience and let the skeptics find their own way through the world. In trusting my own experience, I see meaning in events that others might consider coincidental or just chance. By choosing to search for and see meaning, my life becomes more meaningful. And the older I get, the more convinced I am that to live life without seeing any meaning it is to live a very bleak existence indeed.
As humans, we’re designed to look for patterns and to construct meaning out of the world around us. By paying attention to small and large events, I’ve come to understand some of the cues. When I have a really good idea, my scalp will tingle. I like to think of this as my guidance alerting me to pay attention. If I hear something three times from three different people, I also pay close attention. I suppose that’s in part because three is the archetypal number of fairy tales, so it has a deep cultural resonance. The example that comes to mind is when I taught writing classes to kids and in one week three women asked “When are you going to offer writing classes for adults?” By the third time I heard the question, the idea had taken root and the classes I subsequently offered for adults were delightful experiences.
I understand the risks of relying on signs and portents, especially the risk that I am a fallible human being and could easily read them wrong. I’ve had my intuition clouded by hope and expectation, and I try to learn from such experiences to notice the difference between true intuitive understanding and ego-driven desire. A woman I know suffers from mild paranoia, so whenever she overhears a conversation (usually unclearly because she’s a little deaf) she assumes that the people are saying mean things about her. She assigns meaning that no one else would, and assumes the worst. I try to work from the assumption that my unseen guidance is trying to assist me. Someone once said that if the universe can’t get our attention with a feather, it will use a brick. I try always to notice the feathers so that the brick isn’t necessary.
A couple of months after my mother died, when I was still deep in valleys of grief, I got my bicycle out to go for a ride but had to stop for some reason beside my garden. When I put my hand back on the handlebar, I didn’t see the honeybee that had landed there, and was stung on my palm. I love bees, and regretted the creature’s death, and fortunately didn’t suffer greatly from the sting, though the site remained visible for weeks afterward. Six weeks later, I saw an acupuncturist, and out of curiosity, I asked him if the sting site (which was still red) had any relevance in acupuncture. He told me it was where he’d place a needle to activate Pericardium 8, the protection of the physical and emotional heart. I chose to assign meaning to that sting, in that bees represented for me my first success at publishing my fiction (with “The Silent Meadow,” a story about bees, among other things), and so my work would protect my heart from the grief that life offered. I needed that reminder at the time, and sometimes I still forget. It’s true, though, that writing sustains me through the bad times when nothing else seems to help. I’d rather see the bee sting as carrying that meaning than just have it be another random event in my life. Life is much more interesting this way.
My take is that there doesn’t have to be anything “woo woo” about coincidence for it to be meaningful. We sift through information all the time. A mundane example is that when one has bought a car, cars of that type seem to show up on the road all over the place. They were there all along, but now we notice them. So the fact that I’ve assigned a deep, powerful meaning to a fox sighting doesn’t make that sighting anything supernatural, but neither does it make it any less deep and powerful. I love your bee sting story. Very powerful!