![]() She was apparently conceding everything to the skeptical debunkers – except that the debunkers infer from the randomness of the way the cards come up to a conclusion that Tarot readings are useless. The fact that your Tarot reading produces, say, the Page of Cups here and the Seven of Pentacles there is simple coincidence.” The cards I’m about to turn up for you will have the same probability of being turned up for anybody else. The shuffling of the cards creates randomness. ![]() Some things do have a reason for happening – a lot of things don’t. By random chance it just happens to happen. I believe some things are random, that quite a lot happens that has no reason for happening. “It’s not,” she explained, “that I believe that your psyche, or the world, or anything exerts some force upon the cards as they are shuffled, causing them to turn up the way they do in an order which your personality uniquely determines. She had a deck of Tarot cards, and she looked like she knew how to use it. I was in that bar with a woman a couple years older, Madeleine, a fellow student whom I’d met in British Lit class. I was eighteen-years old, an undergraduate at Atlanta’s Emory University. The concept of meaningful coincidences was first introduced to me about thirty-five years ago – in a bar. Whether or not there’s a prior narrative, we can connect events with a post facto narrative. But what I’ve learned is that we can choose to make meaning out of the coincidences of our lives. I am, myself, by nature or by nurture, more on the ‘a coincidence is just a coincidence’ end of the spectrum. Maybe this is a genetic thing: a predisposition toward placing events in the context of some kind of intentionality or prior narrative may be normally distributed through the population based on DNA. Others of us have brains that are more comfortable with the idea coincidence: sometimes life-changing events happen for no reason at all flukes happen. Maybe some of us have brains that are inclined to interpret events as the unfolding of a grand purpose. You’ve probably heard – and maybe you yourself have said – things happen for a reason.ĭo you believe that? I mean, obviously SOME things happen for a reason, but is there a reason – not just a cause, but a reason – for every important thing that happens to you? Or are some things just coincidence?
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