So we have a new President. Someone I am proud to claim to be the leader of our nation. Maybe for the first time ever. I am not as much patriotic as I am emotional and loyal to my family, friends and experiences. I love the land of the United States because it is so varied and vast.
Whatevs. No one cares about my political affiliations and I shouldn't print them on the internet anyway. What I'm trying to say is: Yay. Obama's President. The winds of change are blowing and they are long overdue. For this, I am grateful.
I'm not a particularly religious person. I don't subscribe to any faith of organized religion or worship any deities. But I will admit there is a lot about this world we don't understand. I just don't necessarily believe that is what most people refer to as "God".
I don't know what to call these moments of transcendence, coincidence or awareness. Perhaps they are just that. Perhaps there is a pattern related to something we can only sense on a rudimentary level. Perhaps it is related to the time-space continuum, and we fumble about bumping into other forms of existence or levels of consciousness and get deja-vu or experience epiphanies or nirvana. I don't know. I love reading about quantum physics, philosophy and religion to imagine what the code, pattern or story is that we can't see. It's fascinating. But I try not to worry too much about it, since I'm pretty darn sure we'll never find the equation, formula or unlock the secret to Heaven during my lifetime.
But sometimes... the world catches my attention. I see patterns forming and I don't know where they originate or what they mean, but I can't help noticing them.
For instance, here is a small one. Yesterday I was at the gym working out on the elliptical machine and I glanced at one of the two tvs positioned on either side of the machine I like to use (I hate watching tv while I work out and choose the machine that has a somewhat straight view out a window), and saw a brief moment of gloppy, glossy, thick peanut butter being scooped out of a jar. I glanced away and then back and couldn't decipher why it had been there, it wasn't a commercial, but part of a news report. I guessed it was about American obesity and forgot about.
Today I rented via HBO On Demand a horrible movie called "Wanted" with Angelina Jolie and watched it. If you have seen it, you know that there is a plot line that involves peanut butter. And in the movie there is a brief moment where one of the lead actors is "pouring" peanut butter out of a can. It's thick and gloppy and remarkably similar to what I saw on the evening news last night.
Not a big deal, but almost the same image.
When I was a young teen one night I dreamed my mother and I were cleaning out the coat closet on the first floor of my then home and I turned to her as she handed me a fedora that was my father's from a shelf high above. I didn't even remember the dream when I woke up, until later that week when we did in fact clean out the coat closet and as she handed me the fedora from a shelf I got a prickly sensation up and down my neck and back. A psychiatrist two decades later would tell me I had the experience first and the dream later, that my memory is flawed. Perhaps it is.
Four years ago when my dear friend called me one night to see how I was doing (I had just moved back to NYC after living away for several years). She asked, "What have you done tonight?" I said, "Well, I decided to take myself out on a date to Turkish food to the restaurant down the block since I had never had Turkish food and now I'm knitting and singing to the radio". She asked, "What songs are you singing along to?" and I answered, "Right now I was just singing along to 'My Cheri Amor' by Stevie Wonder". She said: "That's strange. My work had a benefit tonight and they served Turkish food, which I'd never had before, and Stevie Wonder was there and he sang that song."
Perhaps it is a coincidence that last night both my husband and I dreamed about past lovers, meeting up with them and comparing that love in different ways to our current life together.
Perhaps not.
But when I see an almost replica of 2 images of gloppy peanut butter within 17 hours of one another I have to wonder - is there a pattern?
The meaning, well, I will leave that up to other people. We always want things to mean something, lest we be lost in a sea of randomness and icy cold indifference. I suppose even that has it's reassurances. Many times, I find that sea quite comforting. I am, after all, only someone who will be forgotten, until one day someone in the future hears my name twice in one day, or sees my photo too many times to be explained. And then maybe he or she will wonder... is there a pattern?
No comments:
Post a Comment