The universe wants to be heard on the topic of synchronicity.  Last week I complained that ‘miracles’ were few and far between in my life, even the narrowly defined miracles of Littlewood’s Law.

 I was leaving the hospital when I almost stumbled on the machine that exchanges dollar bills for the special coins that guarantee an exit from the parking garage.  While it is hard to miss the big signs that herald a $1 parking fee at the entrance of the garage, I often drive around with nothing more than a credit card in my pocket.  Confronting a machine that dispensed tokens, and having not one, but two, $1 bills in my possession I decided to purchase two tokens. 

I approached the automated booth behind a small red truck.  A few moments passed and truck didn’t move on.  I watched then as the driver tried to insert a $1 bill into the machine, time and time again, with no success. He carefully smoothed the bill out and re-entered it.  The machine spewed the bill back at him every time like a belligerent child sticking out a thin, green tongue.  The line of cars behind us grew.  Remembering that I had a token to spare,  I walked to the head of the line and asked the gentlemen if I could try a token in the defiant machine.  Even while he asked if I really had a token to spare, I dropped it in the proper slot, and the gate responded.  He stuffed the useless $1 bill in my hand with thanks, and drove off, unblocking our mini-traffic-jam.

The first time I ever bought tokens, I bought two, and both were needed that very day.  But, I’d already had one miracle this month, so now I’ve exceeded the limit of ‘one in a million’ exceptional experiences of note.  Yet,  we live in a random universe.  Random events, even Littlewood’s miracles, can cluster in twos or threes, spread themselves out evenly in thirty day cycles, or go into hiding for years. The folks at MacIntosh learned that most people don’t appreciate the truth about random events when they programmed the first iPods.  So many people complained about the same song showing up two times in a row that the inventors had to reinvent ‘random’ to prevent a truly random repetition.

We may not like it, but, all signs point to a random universe that disregards our need for an orderly progression of events, and likely doesn’t care about the meanings we attach to simple events. But, that makes us the meaning-makers, doesn’t it?  It gives us the power to define ourselves and our lives even in the random intersection of tokens and bills, to make a memorable moment in an otherwise ordinary exchange with machines.