Coincidences (2) …… and causes

 

Coincidences (2) …… and causes
Torrey Orton
April 22, 2013

6 degrees of separation and such matters??

The 6 degrees thing was back in hardcopy sight last week with a few hundred words borrowed from Steve Jones by the Australian Financial Review’s Review (pg. 2R) section on Friday 19, April ’13. It reminded me there is this thing of organic coincidence among us, much closer than many would like to imagine, though increasing the distance as our (advanced?) cultures become more ethnically diverse (which leads directly to DNA diversification, which is good for humanity overall). We are, after all, all out of Africa.

And on they march…coincidences, concurrences (which is a competition for the French!), correlations, co-occurrences – the makings of causes…all the variations on the sense of being in synch with ourselves, others, the world, the multi-verse…Pick your preference if you can; if you can’t, these connections become opportunities for perceived and real dis-connection, being out of synch, feeling out of it.

Sharing house, but a life?

A few days ago one long term patient announced that his girlfriend is house sharing with another patient of mine. What are the chances of that happening? Probably calculable if I can set the parameters, though I couldn’t do the calculation myself. Some of the parameters might be:

·       Prior mental health issue(s), untreated or treated

·       Tertiary education levels

·       Under 35 and over 20

·       Single, and seeking partner

·       Minority backgrounds – race/ethnicity; sexual orientation…

·       Inner suburbs address

·       Share housing

·       Early career in recognised professional field

·       Tertiary educated parents??

These are groupings, presumably linked in some shared way. And if you get enough of them together you have a presumptive causal cluster. Demonstrating it rather than assuming it is the challenge.

But, what possible implication(s) can I draw from the fact of sharing itself, without any presumed other connective effects. So, they happen to share a house. And people share houses with no other connection than the need for sharing (economic/social/and?). These two could not be possible love objects for each other, distinguished as they are by different sexual preferences. Maybe there’s naturally occurring mutual support thru sharing their experiences of therapy with the same therapist…informal quality control reflected back to me as they adjust to our relationship in light of their understanding of it from the other one?? Could be.

Needle, not haystack

This is not a coincidence but a case of finding what I did not know I was looking for. We were wandering along the path in Chamonix towards the Swiss end of town, with Mont Blanc and the Aiguille du Midi across the valley to the right and the local stream just off the path. On our left was a rock face of about 300 meters height forming the base of the lower range facing Mont Blanc. A few ropes were laid down the face from different heights and groups of primary school kids were being instructed in the entry level arts of defying the heights. I grabbed a couple of quick shots of the site and the little scramblers and sent it off to a patient at the time who was struggling to overcome such fears, which she subsequently did…with the slight increase in risk-taking which comes with its acknowledgement by others.

This is evidence of unconscious processes at work, as they often are in the therapy, the scanning for world understanding and the writing parts of my life. Much less so with the Friends of FCC work…or so it seems.

Her past just walked in the door

Then there’s the ex-patient of mine who started her own therapy practice and within a week a facsimile of her PhD candidate self walked in the door, struggling with a similar range of things she had herself back then – doubt, motivational slippage, conflict with supervisors, data collection glitches….normal stuff, except when you are in it; then it’s the pains which assure you the honour of completion is warranted, maybe. Within a couple of days an article had appeared in the New York Times on PhD study challenges, assaying the terrain we had just been revisiting. I passed it on and received a quick acknowledgement of a good fit with her own experience and that of her new patient.                  

And, there are the patients who seem to come in clusters of same-symptoms, same traumas, often over a week or two. This is signalled to me when I start telling one patient of another with similar concerns who I realise in the telling I just saw the day before or the week before. This is probably a case of proximity calling out approximately equal experiences from my recollections of near patients…not that there is a collocation of people and life practices in neat experiential bundles by chance!!!

J’s meeting of future wife D

K and cult colleague J went out to find dinner in Bangkok in the cultish way - begging it from neighbourhood restaurants /cafes. J suggested they ‘find’ the one they would try first by praying for a minute. They did so, and J asked K what God offered and K said there, pointing to a hotel a ways off. J said, “Just what I got”.  And off they went to be waited on by J’s future wife who was in her last hours of a three day employment trial (which she failed). The rest was 20+ years of the deepest marital solidarity which was broken before time by cancer. The cult had gone the way of some bad things well before the untimely cancers seized D.

A bag of lesser treats

·       Our in-laws at Jinks Winery, Tonimbuck, Vic… a classic coincidence which J and I both imagined was going to occur as we got within site of the winery. We’d only been there once before for their elder son’s wedding 3 years ago. We walked in the café door and a few steps inside spied them sitting at the nearest table… as if waiting for us. They weren’t, but also weren’t too surprised we appeared.

·       And there’s the guy in the incinerated fire zone of the Murrindindi fire four years ago whose house at Marysville, Vic. was the only one for a mile around NOT touched by the fires which killed 173. When I called hopefully to see if they were still OK, he said “Yes, and our fire insurance lapsed a week ago”!!

·       And there’s the synch of ‘Mother” coming to my mind in patient M’s discussion of recent developments and she having her dead birth mother coming at the same time to her mind though I was thinking of her step mother…but it’s all part of the total system of her family of origin relationships which cue each other...in her and me.

This matter of therapeutic synch is seriously interesting as a possible member of the coincidence genre. It’s a false coincidence, reflecting rather the coming together of minds that are on a sufficiently shared track, where each other’s stories and roles are firmly enough in mind not to have to be held in mind consciously. So, such synching moments in therapy are expressions or emanations of jointness, and also famously the place in which exactly whose mind is speaking at any moment is a wonder to be validated by checking – the principle activity of maintaining clarified jointness.

The emanations take the early form of premonitions of being in synch, of knowing what the other is thinking/ feeling and hence an example of empathy. In ordinary talk, this premonition is found in the listeners regularly completing the active speaker’s sentences before they do or adding the words the speaker is searching for at appropriate times (e.g. when a felt need to confirm correct attention occurs).

Coincidences…… revisited

Coincidences…… revisited

Torrey Orton

March 17, 2013

 

That more and more coincidences seem to be appearing in my life has been in my awareness for some years (see from four years ago Appreciations (16)-Coincidentally yours? in www.diarybyamadman.blogspot.com ) …and I’ve lost a sheaf of them as a result of not noticing my awareness. So here comes a reinvented topic range.

I am regularly reminded of the existence of apparent coincidences by the correlation between my recalling a certain ex-patient 6 or more months or up to 3-4 years after their stopping therapy and their calling for a new appointment. This correlation is so common in my practice I now expect any recollection to be followed by a reconnection. Perhaps from now I’ll begin recording the first to track the arrival, or not, of seconds.

I’m aware, also, that coincidence is often the expression of some kind of familiarity which in turn (?) is enlivened by personal recollection, by the fact that people and events come to mind in apparently the most unlikely places. This is in turn arises from our natural emotion-based filing systems. Many of their contents are connected in pre-conscious ways revealed over-and over again by associations coming into view with no immediately obvious relation to present events….etc.

 I have always had a talent for running into people in the strangest places, so that these days I expect if I visit a foreign place someone I know, usually from the distant past, will pop up for an unarranged hello. They are almost always more than pleasant events, happenings in public with ashamed priests to the contrary notwithstanding.

So let’s get a bit more systematic, starting with data collecting.

Pinky presences and absences

I was standing Saturday morning witness to the harassing of patients at the FCC a week ago with another Friend of the FCC and the regular security guard. We enjoy good bantering Oz male bonding and re-bonding every Saturday. His aversion to more recently introduced bonding activities like hugs from colleagues of varying ages and sexes is notorious among us, which doesn’t prevent some of the younger Friends persisting in the hope they can re-educate him, or maybe it’s just cultural insensitivity both ways.

Anyway, one such effort had just been rebuffed and I, addressing the other Friend (a young gay woman quite new to the witness role), wondered what he would do if I offered a hug and in the same breath stretching my 7 foot wingspan in an embracing arc towards him from about 8 feet away. He stood there rigid and blank faced. He is very disciplined. A few tours in Vietnam, 13 years in the Army subsequently and 30 plus years consequently of professionally securing all kinds of installations and events underpin his resilient presence.

“Did you notice his left pinky twitch slightly?” I asked her in his hearing. Neither she nor he had noticed, and maybe even I didn’t either though it seemed so at the moment. My suggestion was strong enough that he started feeling his left pinky with his right hand … and suddenly said “Shit” with the force which assures its authenticity, shocking us all (even the HoGPIs across the foot path) in the way deeply troubled expressions usually do.

He discovered he had lost his company ring, a ring he never takes off. Its fit was always a smidge loose. He was stricken, thrown into a flurry of activities, all fruitless until six days later, to discover it. Turned up in a corner of the wash room in the security company office…found by a colleague who came out from a hand wash wondering whose ring it was.

How did I know to covertly tell him to check for it in the first place?

 

What floor do you want?

He did not say or ask when he followed me into a CBD lift a few days back. I was somewhat hurried and touched L-5 by mistake, then my desired L-2 which sits just below 5 on the pick-a-story pad. The delivery guy just behind me reached over to touch L-12 and I mumbled a quick apology for my miss-selection, which he had not noticed. But having it pointed out in my act of contrition, he realized that he actually needed L-5 to complete his deliveries. He would have realized it when he got to L-12 and still had stuff left over.

How often do I get to do something wrong (adding an unnecessary stop to the lift ascension) and have it made right by chance?? Did I know this one, too? Is it like the pinky absent its ring? No. That was getting something right (his pinky did twitch) and getting something more and totally unexpectable (no one on site at this moment knew he had lost his pinky ring) for me and him.

Are these just examples of being in synch, “on the same page”, in tune….with others?

A train ride and the coincidence of this coincidence

I’m thinking about coincidences and a patient walked in, not knowing of my emerging attention to coincidences, and launched into a coincidence of his which was enormously informative for his work and our work, not even seeing fully the parallels between them all. It went like this.

He was standing at a local train station and an older woman (80ish it turned out) asked which platform the Alamein train left by. He checked it out and told her “the one we’re on now”. ..with which she initiated a discussion that went on for the wait and subsequent ride, largely consisting of aspects of her life like being a non-graduate engineer most of her life and having learned whatever was necessary as new tasks came her way from management (which is how he’s living his professional life) and having been the inventor of a famous piece of sheep shearing technology 50 years ago and now pursuing a PhD in some applied area, until she got off. He listened in quiet astonishment at the unlikely claims, so astonished that he didn’t get her name, not because she withheld it.

The name came after his arrival at his aunt’s home, which was why he was awaiting the Alamein train. As he regaled her with the sheep-shearing engineer’s story aunt reached for an article about a “mature age” PhD candidate at a local university saying “she sounds like…” and handed him the article, confirming to his multiple amazements that she was not fabricating, just reporting, her life. For he, too, is in the middle of a self-built professional life converting what he feels is a thin educational foundation into an already professionally acknowledged value for others. If he were looking for a role model he could hardly have done better than her.

 But then, we don’t look for role models until we don’t need them, almost. Once we are well down our life roads, the supporting tuition may just pop up. An unnoticed coincidence may be no instruction at all. An acknowledged and embraced coincidence may be confused with our own developing awareness.

Appreciations (16) – Coincidentally yours?

Appreciations (16) – Coincidentally yours?

Torrey Orton

December 6, 2009

It keeps happening. It's almost predictable in a general way. That is, I can predict the range of time in which it will happen and the type of people it will happen with, but not who about what exactly when and where. Like my farmer friend's rain forecasts.

It may be an emergence to do with the present stage of my life – that my worlds are sufficiently defined and extended to ensure repeat encounters with their various members. I always had a way with chance encounters – running into a boarding school acquaintance in the streets of Paris on my first visit there 38 years ago. I had not seen the guy for ten years, and then wasn't close ever. I think he was on his first visit there, too.

Passed by George Gregan in the same Paris streets almost to the block two years ago…doesn't really count as my world except in its most extenuated version, but whateva. Can't walk through Melbourne without seeing someone from the last 35 years on the pathways. Have similar experiences around the world, almost. I've always been that way. It's always been that way. I expect to meet someone from backwhen anytime I'm back there, or even over somewhere else.

For instance, I had a catchup call from a guy who'd read a letter of mine to The Australian HIGHER EDUCATION a couple weeks back (published Nov. 25^th, 09). He'd come across it reading the section by chance. I had last seen him on a Singapore-Perth flight 18 months ago which neither of us was supposed to be on. Last minute changes / options coming back from Europe. I'd previously seen him three years ago south of Melbourne where he now lives.

So, last Wednesday there I was wondering about how a certain patient client was doing since our work seemed at a dicey spot, and there she was walking up Bourke Street. More common is the arrival of an email – medium of the global village, message of the faintly distant – from London or Lonsdale Street within days of my thinking of their authors, usually for the first time in months.

A similar performance time frame applies to therapy clients who I've not heard from for a while – a day or two's lapse and there they are out of the ether, too. Then there are the texters (medium of the wouldbe close) from here and there, who pop up in the same kind of time frames, though usually shorter, often enough shorter to be remarkable, within an hour or two of my thinking of them. It's almost as if I had power at a distance. Is the next item a proof?

At least one message from one recent incident of near simultaneous being-in-my-mind-is-being-in-the- other's was this: "OK now you're getting spooky on me. I was actually staring at my computer thinking about how I can't forget to do one of the meditation exercises tomorrow morning and then your email appeared". I had offered earlier in the day to send a set of directions for starting meditation practice and finally gotten around to it later that evening just as he was, unknown to me, sitting there. This may be an example of creepy closeness or provocative proximity.

It's true in the latter cases that I have some more immediate, weighted relationship in progress with these people which inclines towards interaction and thinking of each other. We are provided with the means (text) of immediate signalling our wonders to those who are their subject(s)/object(s) without interrupting them as a phone call would. Enacting our queries comes increasingly naturally (though it's taken me a while to get comfortable with the rules and opportunities of this medium). This in its wide- reaching potential perhaps constitutes a force field? A potential field of forces? Is it, too, a shadow of a community? Which way is the shadow moving? Towards the light or away?