Hello mxchicmx and Matthew,
I have the same experiences. For example, the only time I was ever inside a New York City skyscraper was on September 4, 2001 (My wife’s family came over from Italy for a visit so we took 'em to NYC). As I stood on the observation deck of the Empire State Building that morning, I looked South to the Financial District. And as I looked at the Twin Towers (hand-on-heart) I had a vision of an airplane crashing into them. Eerie, don’t you think? Not at all. Let me explain.
I don’t board an airplane without envisioning stress cracks in the wing spars or without envisioning flocks of birds out there, waiting to be sucked into the jet engine intake. I sometimes think about great asteroids striking cities and stone-sized meteorites striking my car. And I was in top-form that day on the Empire State Building. I was wondering about a geological fault running along the Hudson; would a slight tremor of just the “right” frequency resonate with the skyscraper’s “fixed-free” vibration mode in order to destroy it? I was wondering how I’d escape if there were a fire some forty stories below me. Would I rather burn to death or jump over the side? I thought about what it might feel like to climb over the edge and jump. And everyone knows the story about the WW2 aircraft that crashed into the Empire State Building. Well, my mind wouldn’t let that one go either, so I imagined an airplane whacking into the Chrysler Building and as I said, into the Twin Towers. I even envisioned one hitting the Statue of Liberty.
One week later I was digging potatoes in my garden when my wife ran out to tell me the awful news. Can you guess one of the first things that went through my head? That’s right. I thought of my “premonition” (yep, now it’s a premonition) of an airplane hitting the Twin Towers. I thought, OMG! I was staring at the World trade Center exactly one week ago and thinking about an airplane hitting it! And I had a little shiver standing there in my straw hat, clutching my garden fork.
What I was doing was counting a rare “hit” while discounting all the thousands upon thousands of “misses.” My wife didn’t run out to tell me that an earth-tremor, an asteroid, or a fire had devastating the World Trade Center; she told me about an airplane collision. If today I heard that a meteorite had struck someone’s car, well, I’d think that I’d already imagined it.
I trudge along everyday thinking all sorts of things about the future (one of the primary functions of consciousness). Given that a steady stream of thoughts, apprehensions and supposed situations concerning the future pass through my mind, should it really surprise me that I have at least an occasional “hit”? And should I really be surprised at my propensity to count the few “hits” but discount the far greater number of “misses”?
I read a story some years ago about a nurse living in London during the time of the Blitz. She walked the same route from the bus stop to her job at the hospital every working day. But one day she had a sudden and unexplained inclination to make a detour on her way to work. So, she walked up several blocks before turning towards the direction of the hospital. And as she was walking along she heard a “buzz bomb” flying overhead, and then the dreaded silence, followed by a tremendous explosion. The bomb had devastated the very place she would have been walking had she taken her usual route. Years later, the nurse explained how this was a pivotal event in her life. She felt that God had spared her life that day. How else could one explain it? From that day onward, she’d been a devout Christian.
But consider this. Some 43,000 civilians were killed by the Blitz. Each of them was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Had any of these folks had an unexplained inclination to be somewhere else when the bomb hit, then presumably they’d be telling us how God had other plans for them, etc. In fact, we’re not getting a balanced sampling of the data. We only get to hear about the few “miracles.” The 43,000 dead people don’t get a chance to tell their story.
Studs Terkel, in his book about WW2, interviewed an American soldier who’d been in the Pacific. The soldier said that before he’d gone into combat for the first time he’d met quite a few combat veterans. He reasoned that if all of them could survive then so could he. But later, having watched guys next to him die, he figured it out; he never met the guys that died; he only met the survivors. Again, this means that he hadn’t gotten a balanced sampling of the data.
Steven Pinker talks about such things in his book, How the Mind Works. He mentions also the “miracles” of finding Jesus’ face in a tortilla or having the Madonna appear in the condensation between two panes of window glass. If you stop to consider the number of tortillas made each day by Jesus worshipers, then you wouldn’t think it strange at all when Jesus’ face occasionally appears.
I once met an Argentinean guy while traveling on a train in Spain. We ended up traveling together for a few days. I said adios to him one morning in Seville; I was headed for Portugal and he was headed down to the coast. But there was a rail-strike in Portugal, so I went North, ending up in Madrid the following Sunday. Leaving the Prado that warm February afternoon, I decided to walk down the promenade in the city park. Ten thousand people had the same idea, because the park was wall-to-wall people. But walking along, I happened to see in the distance a familiar ski parka. It was Ricardo. He spotted me at about the same time. What were the chances of that? Neither of us had plans to be in Madrid. Amid these thousands of people I happened to see the only person in the entire country that I knew by name. If Ricardo had been Ricardalina, we might even have suspected that “fate” was pushing us together.
My wife and I sometimes recount the endless events that had to happen as they did in order for her and I to meet as we did. In fact, the next stranger you meet, ask yourself what are the odds that out of all the people in the world you’d just so happen to meet this special person? Life is a procession of occurrences, and if we place a special value on certain types of occurrences, then we’ll remark when those occurrences happen; otherwise, we let them go by without comment. If a stranger you see today has the face you dreamed about last night then you’re going to be astonished. But everyone you meet has a face, and the vast majority of the faces don’t make much of an impression on people.
Just the other day I was in the market and a woman suddenly looked up as she saw me approach. Our eyes met for less than a quarter of a second, but just as quickly she looked back down to her apples. What impressed me was the fact that this woman had never seen me before, and yet in so little time she had dismissed me as utterly uninteresting and unimportant in her life. But what are the chances that we would meet like that? Each of our two lives had to go exactly as they did in order for us to be together in that particular place and at that specific time; just so that she could look up at me and see nobody.
BTW, the chapter titled, “Origins and Miracles,” of Richard Dawkins’ The Blind Watchmaker also has a good discussion about coincidence and miracles.
I’ll see ya when I see ya,
Michael
edit: spelling