If you have not read The Celestine Prophesy book, do so soon. It’s essential message is simple: ‘coincidences’ or synchronicity are not accidents. You don’t believe me? Just look at yesterday.
I spent the day working at a golf tournament. Early during my day there, I met a lady sitting near the area where I was due to work. We got talking. We discovered that we knew people in common; not such a surprise in small island communities. As I was later given my assignment in another area far from where the lady worked, I said something like “Nice to have met you.” Moments later, my ‘supervisor’ came to ask me to move to another location…right where the lady was working. We smiled and struck up conversations again. She later went on to do her thing, of checking dignataries into her hospitality area. As the afternoon wore on, it was clear that few of the expected dignatiraies were coming. The lady beckoned me to join her hospitality tent, once I had finished my shift. I moved from gatekeeper, to VIP, once I had taken off my ‘uniform’. Thank you, for the hospitality, Ms. X 🙂 (I do know her name.)
Not long after I started my shift, I met a young lady in an orange tee shirt, responsible for an adjacent VIP tent, while she was welcoming guests. I noticed the company had a connection with my wife’s local church. I mentioned that it would have been nice for the hospitality to have extended to the church, as a sign of good relationships. She nodded and acknowledged the point. Later, while I was enjoying my time as a VIP, I sidled over to the area that separated the two sets of corporate hospitality areas. I started speaking to a man with a large cigar in his mouth, who looked like he might be a CEO. We started chatting and again the point about the church came up. I mentioned my link and he said that the next day I would be free to join his group. OK. 🙂 He walked off to talk with some of the guests. Two men who had been beside him started a conversation with me, and we got onto the tortured existence of getting citizens in our region to change. Suddenly, while talking about the difficulty of our neighbouring islanders to understand each other (Jamaican Patois is often unintelligible for others), I mentioned a Russian word, and immediately one of the men made a remark in fluent Russian. He asked me if I spoke the language and I said I did. We exchanged on our history of learning it: he did so at university in Alabama during the 1980s, but had never been to Russia. I had learned my Russian in the early 1990s and had visited Russia and Russian-speaking countries many times. He is Bahamian, I am Jamaican. We could not converse well in our local dialects or languages, but we could converse in Russian. Bizarre! Or was it? The two men were readying to leave, and the orange tee shirt lady came by us. One of the men explained how we had never met but found we were ‘friends’. She looked bewildered but listened to the summary of our meeting. “That’s too much for my head!” she said. We spoke for a few moments later, then she handed me a bag, containing selected merchandise goodies that had been selected for the invited guests. Remember, I was not one of them. Nice! All that from a chance meeting. Really?
After getting back to my mother-in-law’s house in the evening, my brother-in-law and I headed to the airport to try to deal with a damaged bag. We went to the Customs are but the officer there could not get a representative from American Airlines to answer the phone, and we were contemplating having to wait for the last flight to come in after 10pm to find someone. Then, in came a rep from Delta, and I said “We want a rep from AA to come in, now.” Boom! The door opened and in walked…an AA rep…on cue. We got the baggage claim made and left the airport. What is the probability of someone appearing seconds after you wish they would appear? I looked for my genie lamp. 🙂
Jamaica: Political Economy 