Chapter 14 - Heart Math
Coincidence Speaks
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Welcome to the latest installment of Coincidence Speaks. Chapters are crafted so they can be read on a standalone basis. For the full experience head this way to start at the beginning!↩️
Chapter 14 finds Paul trying to pull a puzzle apart…
Chapter 14
Heart Math
Two years passed—sixty million seconds or so, to be a little more precise—and life went on. That, at least, was one thing that could always be counted on.
Clara and Paul had been gifted a beautiful baby boy in the meantime, his wide-eyed curiosity and even-keeled nature bringing new light and life to their family. They named him Luke.
Over time’s inevitable march, most of the more mind-stretching phenomena had slowly faded away into the distilled vagaries of fallible human memory, and Paul had settled back into the more rational—and seemingly more comfortable—groove of “normal” life. He hadn’t fully forgotten, but the events from those two years prior had now become distant and surreal. The beautiful pulsing auras and prophetic dreams and the cascade of improbable events dwindled into fickle figments of an overactive imagination; residual hallucinations left over from a highly traumatic experience.
But every now and then, a striking coincidence would occur that would ever-so-briefly jumpstart his remembered experience of being an integral part of something bigger, something more. An electric reminder that everyone and everything was an essential part of the same fabric, uniquely interwoven threads within the same universal cloth.
But while that recognition still remained at an intellectual level and he tried his best to act from that place, he’d lost the feeling sense of interconnection, the direct flowing experience of a world that was responsive and expressive.
A world that was alive.
Paul walked alone on his lunch break, absentmindedly checking his watch every few minutes, as if he’d lost something there.
The past two years in the business world had been successful ones, and he was now Vice President at his company, on the cusp of making Senior Vice President. The seconds ticked away with military precision, one after the other in perfect lockstep.
A lovely Wednesday in the suburbs offered an encouraging backdrop of greens and growth, and a mockingbird sang songs of spring while his dress shoes crunched atop a gravel footpath. Paul didn’t notice. He was much too busy mulling over a new job opportunity.
Paul had been with the same financial company for his full fifteen year career, and was poised and perfectly comfortable there. But for the better part of the past nine months, a new bank to the area called the Bank of Newcastle had been doing its darnedest trying to recruit him over. Their team had been having challenges establishing a foothold in the local market, and Paul’s skillset happened to fit what they needed to a “T.”
He’d recently met with the executive team and several board members at the Bank of Newcastle, and respect for the valuable time of others now yielded a pressing urgency to make a decision. The lunch break walk was a final, last ditch effort to determine the best pathway forward.
“It’s crap or get off the pot time, any way I look at it,” his thoughts giving crude voice to the archetypal conflict—to stay, or to leave.
He’d asked Clara for her thoughts the night before, after the little ones were tucked in and they’d finally collapsed into bed, exhausted by the day.
“I’m in full support of whatever you want to do,” she’d said. “Either option is great as far as I can see… but I admit I’m pretty intrigued by the Bank of Newcastle. Their entire management team has been so welcoming, and the way they’ve rolled out the red carpet… it’s obvious how much they value you.”
He could hear the pride in her voice—the conscientious display of recruiting had been a recognition and validation of her husband’s hard work and worth over fifteen years. And the short term potential for greater income was a significant, if unspoken factor.
Paul wasn’t so sure.
He loved the camaraderie and friendships right where he was and had been there since he was barely twenty years old, on a part time basis while finishing college. He knew all of the gatekeepers and critical systems inside out and backward.
“At the end of the day, there’s just too much of risk in leaving the nest to join some brand new, unproven bank,” he mused to himself as he walked, on the verge of a final conclusion.
Lost in his own thoughts, he didn’t notice the mockingbird had stopped singing.
Paul had been doggedly working to figure out the “Right Decision” through careful, painstaking inquiry using a business technique he’d learned called a S.W.O.T. analysis (Strengths Weaknesses Opportunities Threats). Truthfully, he’d been trying to solve the problem at hand for months now.
“Problem? What a first world problem,” he chided himself, footsteps still crackling through the gravel, continuing to drown out the musical birdsong around him. “Look at you, man—another middle class guy worrying about how to best live your particular brand of ‘privilege.’”
But that’s not what it felt like in the moment.
In the moment it felt like he was putting the fifteen-year career he’d worked so hard for and so carefully cultivated on the line. It felt like he was risking his own family’s future and well-being.
He was so lost in thought trying to figure out whether he should join the Bank of Newcastle that he didn’t notice that he’d hopped in his car and driven all the way home—right smack in the middle of the workday.
As a well-trained motor cortex honed by hundreds of homebound commutes guided automated arms into making the final right turn into his neighborhood, Paul abruptly realized where he was, and laughed aloud.
The unexpected burst of laughter rippling through his lungs triggered something—an old familiar feeling of levity… of lightness… and it seemed to loosen something in him. Something shifted inside, something big. A massive, spontaneous sigh emerged…
…and with it, Paul dropped everything.
Shoulders relaxed for the first time in months, dropping all the way down in the midst of that long exhale, and he became acutely aware of one simple fact:
He really didn’t know the best option.
And no amount of thinking about it, no amount of exhaustive analysis could ever yield the best pathway forward for him and his family. There were just far too many variables for his limited linear left brain to calculate.
“No matter what I decide to do, even if it’s the ‘right’ decision, ultimately it’s purely an exercise in trust that it’ll turn out OK. I could get laid out by a bus tomorrow and all my best laid plans would be ruined anyway.”
“Trust…” something ancient stirred within him.
The sudden inspiration landed: “Why not ask to be shown the best way forward?”
So that’s exactly what he did—out loud for emphasis, a little self-consciously but with real, heartfelt sincerity:
“I’m not sure what to do—please show me the best way forward in my career and my life. Not just for me, not just for my family, but for the greater benefit of all!”
That last part about the greater benefit had popped out without thinking. “Ego much?” he laughed, a little sheepish about it.
Yet with that spontaneous invocation, for the first time in what felt like forever, there it was. That nearly forgotten sense of infinite possibility, of adventure. That feeling of timelessness suspended in the air at the Gold’s Gym. That dreamlike expansive sense of depth in the furthest corner of the emergency room. A sudden, total shift in perspective that life was no longer happening to him—but for him and with him.
Spring erupted all around, a symphony of birdsong and greenery positively bursting through the car windows with the same radiant energy as the brilliant sun pulsing in the sky. The world got porous and spacious and real as he totally dropped his analytical thinking, dropping instead into an open-hearted acceptance, into something beyond trust, beyond hope: a pure, experiential knowing that he was an integral part of life and that it was in full support of his highest expression, whatever that might turn out to be. It felt like anything could happen.
And as Paul turned the corner into his neighborhood, something did.
He found his attention being magnetized like a tractor beam by an unfamiliar car parked on the curb. It stuck out like a sore thumb—in the middle of the workday, it was the only car on the entire street. And it was parked right in front of his house. In front of his mailbox, in fact—as if there was a message there waiting for him.
“Why’s this car blocking my mailbox?”
A tangible upwelling sprouted from the core of his chest as he tuned into the curiously placed car—a spreading gentle warmth. The conscious act of relinquishing personal control to a greater sense of interconnective benevolence had tuned him right back into the cellular resonance of his heart. He could feel it. It was unmistakable. It was undeniable. It was real.
Then he saw it. The license plate.
“What the…” Paul’s jaw dropped to the floorboards.
“❤️NWCSTLE.”
At a complete loss for a rational explanation, he watched his stubborn mind grasping at straws. “Maybe the Bank of Newcastle is somehow tracking me?” he thought. “The CEO is pretty damn persistent, but this is freaking ridiculous.”
Or maybe… hmm… maybe the Bank of Newcastle was influencing his decision process with subliminal messaging set up outside of his house? “Yeah, that’s it,” he chuckled, “It’s dead obvious—I must be the target of deep covert ops from a century old bank headquartered a hundred miles away.”
“Whose car even is this?” he asked aloud. There was no one in it, and no trace of anyone anywhere in his neighborhood.
Shaken to the core, Paul drove back to the office to finish out the workday.
When he got home later that evening, the car had disappeared. Just like the prone man in his office, he never saw it again.
He stared up at the ceiling that night in bed, heart pounding, waves of electric awe keeping him awake.
“How is this even possible? Could it really just be pure chance?”
He pulled out his journal and wrote a single sentence:
Maybe coincidence isn’t as random as we think it is.
Then he closed his eyes.
END PART II
PART III, Chapter 15 of Coincidence Speaks will post in the imminent future. Thanks for being here in interactive real time! Comments and feedback always welcome.
In gratitude,
E.T. Allen
I like how you are drawing the reader into Paul's decision making process, creating suspense by slowing down time, ending on a significant number plate on an apparently random car in a conspicuous place, and then ~ cliffhanger...