Chapter 21 - License Plates and Copiers
Coincidence Speaks
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Happy Friday friends! Welcome to Chapter 21 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!↩️
Every now and again I come across creative work from Substackia and the greater internet Void that I find exceptionally moving—all the way to an italicized degree.
This personal essay by
gives me hope for social media, if not all of humanity. If you haven’t already, read it and weep. (I did.) Or even better—listen to the audio version! 🤘🐦Onward to Chapter 21…
Chapter 21
License Plates and Copiers
The whole game changed.
Over the next several days, even as the proverbial excrement continued to hit the fan at work and at home, Paul started to get a sense of acceptance and sometimes even an odd little surge of gratitude whenever his emotional equilibrium got triggered. The teaching held within the glinting black eyes of a hundred crows had found fertile ground, and the journal riding shotgun in his car lay open to its last entry:
“Life always responds when I consciously face my fears.”
And his ongoing daily awareness expansion practices really began to pay dividends. Although now it was much less about “expanding awareness,” and more about preparing a space of openness to feel whatever was going on inside. Greater perspective and enhanced sensitivity were simply the welcome side effects.
Using the added observational capacity he’d gained from his practice, Paul turned daily life into a game: where he’d try as best he could to keep one part of his attention externally oriented on the world around him, and the other part simultaneously on the inner world within. And he began to notice how emotion would first arise as a tangible, somatic, physical sensation within his body. Just like with Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy, but without his mortality at stake. As a real-time witness to his own inner state, he could make immediate note of when and where and how different types of emotions impacted him, what types of thoughts they were connected to, and what their related sensations were.
Anger was a fire in the abdomen and a tightening grip on the throat, fear and anxiety could be felt as nausea in the stomach with frozen tendrils reaching up into the heart, repression of truth and blocked creative expression as tightness in the throat and jaw, and mental frustration and overthinking as pressure in the head.
Tying these physical sensations back to his experience of Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy—he knew that even though these emotions were invisible, subjective impulses, over time they accumulated and resulted in very real, very visceral symptoms.
Over time, emotions crystallized into very physical things, and he ignored them at his own peril!
The more reacquainted Paul became with his inner emotional state and its intrinsic coloring of his experience of the world around him, the more he began to sense something ancient. Something he could no longer ignore. Something the murder of crows had revealed deep within him: a great Gordian knot of tension lodged smack in the core of his gut.
And ever since that turning point four years ago at the RSD specialist’s office when he’d heeded the cellular warning around the spinal nerve block and spinal cord stimulator, he’d made the commitment to always try to listen to his body when it spoke. Especially when it came to the sensitive bundle of nerves in his stomach.
So the next day before work he rose before the sun and his family, heading upstairs to the spare guest room to sit and feel further into this adamant gnawing pull. To tune as deeply as possible into what the unsettling feeling might want to communicate.
It felt like… something wanted to move. Like something in him wanted—needed—change. The unnerving sensation of anxious restlessness was jammed right up at the top of his solar plexus, reaching its cold tendrils on up into his heart.
Fear.
But he didn’t know why the heck it was there or what it could possibly mean.
What was there to be afraid of after all? He’d already been through a terrible incurable disease for God’s sake. And life was so good now. Clara was as happy as he’d ever seen her. His family was in the best place they’d ever been. He’d achieved everything he’d wanted professionally since he’d made the leap to the Bank of Newcastle.
It didn’t make any sense.
So he asked aloud for clarity, trusting his life to reveal the answer over time. “OK then—what. What is it I’m being invited to become aware of here? I want to know. I want to learn. Show me.”
But even though he was plaintively asking, Paul wasn’t anywhere near prepared for the answer that came.
A crystal clear knowing arrived out of the infinite depths. Like it had been there all along—he just couldn’t see it until he found enough courage to ask the question.
Paul gulped. “That was fast…”
The knowing pointed directly towards something that scared the bejeezus out of him.
It was the unshakeable intuition that the time would soon be arising to make a new leap of faith. The next stage in Paul’s life… if he was up for it… was to open up a brand new space for change in his career.
But this time, not just to step out of his hard-earned position with the intent to immediately transition to something new. But to do it open-ended. Without a landing spot lined up. In full trust. In full acceptance and responsiveness to the real-time communication of his life, wherever that took him, for better or for worse.
This wouldn’t be given to him neatly packaged like a Valentine’s Day gift from the Bank of Newcastle showing up on a car with a heart on it in front of his house. This felt more like a direct challenge from life itself:
Do you really want to live a life of true freedom? A life of spontaneous magic? How much do you want it?
Paul had no idea that the direct inquiry around the embedded tension would show him anything like this. A huge part of him wished he’d just let sleeping dogs lie.
Yet it was true—in long-buried depths of his heart, Paul yearned to fully honor the childhood promise he’d made to himself and to his future children. To begin a new adventure beyond the four-walled confines of a seventeen-year corporate career and all of its relentlessly burgeoning expectations. To begin his real life.
Ready or not, that future was now.
Four years prior, courtesy of the life or death circumstances provided by Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy, Paul had been given a brief taste of what living free of fear was truly like. Now it seemed he was being given an expanded opportunity to face all of his long-standing inner tensions and release them once and for all—by allowing them to come up and walking through them as they arose. In full awareness.
But Paul was angry.
“What a load of crap! I’ve worked my everliving butt off, done everything I’m supposed to do as a responsible father and husband, and I’ve finally gotten to the point where I can actually enjoy the fruits of my labor.
Nuh-uh. No way. You’re not going to see this guy blow up his life on some kind of spiritual odyssey.”
The anger was perfectly legitimate. Weren’t all emotions legitimate, after all? It was resistance to feeling them that was the real issue—when he let them accumulate to the point of defining his experience, defining who and what he was, rather than simply noticing what they were there to communicate in the first place, and acting accordingly.
Later that morning Paul’s car sludged its way down a traffic-clogged four lane road into the office, twenty minutes late for work, grumbling and muttering to himself, “There’s no way; I’m not gonna just up and leave my freaking job, this is crazy, this can’t be right.”
He growled aloud for the world to hear, for his life to hear—a forceful declaration of rebellion: “I can’t do this.”
As if in direct response, the car in the lane next to him exploded in movement, yanking his attention as it blazed through the yellow light of the intersection just ahead.
Paul’s eyes widened. The license plate on that car, of all bloody things to have on it, spelled out in plain English: “YESUCAN.”
He shook his head in defiance, trying to shake off the fluke timing with a scoff. “Bullshit!”
It was one thing for a striking coincidence to point towards a positive new direction in life, but this was something different. This had to be subjective self-delusion, not a supportive feedback loop. If he was communicating with some kind of interconnected benevolent flow state, it certainly wouldn’t be telling him to do something totally inane, totally irresponsible, totally stupid, like walking away from a secure, well-paying job—especially not as the primary family provider with a wife and young children and a mortgage. Right?
He must’ve gone too far, gotten high off his own supply, been blinded by his own confirmation bias. But this wasn’t something he was looking to have confirmed—Paul didn’t want to change. Plus if he did take a step back from his job, what would he even do? How would he support his family?
“No way I’m taking that kind of chance!” he reaffirmed to the world through the open sunroof again, as if the sky was listening.
No sooner did those words split the air then the driver right in front of him mashed their brakes in a split decision to stop for the impending red light. Paul screeched to a stop, inches away from a rear-end collision. Heart thumping and breathless from the near miss, inches away from his front bumper, up close and personal, was yet another license plate: “TK A CHNC.”
Paul’s eyes almost popped out of his head. “Take a chance?!”
Insanity.
This wasn’t the way it was supposed to go. He was perfectly fine, perfectly comfortable where he was. He didn’t want to just up and walk away from his hard-earned career. This communicative connective “flow,” or whatever the hell was going on, was obviously flat out wrong.
“This is absolutely nuts. I gotta be losing my mind here.”
Nothing made sense anymore. Paul felt sick to his stomach.
Ducking into the office through a side door, he muttered to himself under his breath, avoiding contact with coworkers and giving everyone an extra wide berth through the hallways.
Paul shut his office door and tried to distract himself with routine paperwork, unable to get his reeling mind off an unrelenting world that somehow wouldn’t leave him alone. It was like he’d opened some kind of personalized Pandora’s box.
After a few blessedly uneventful minutes he printed out a financial report and headed over to the copy room to pick it up. Maybe the insistent feedback loops wouldn’t be able to reach him within the thick steel confines of Class A office space. As he walked into the threshold of the copy room, one eye still on the acute turmoil roiling within, and the other on his surroundings, he remembered again that hard-earned sense of trust that whatever was happening was ultimately for him, not to him…
…and let everything go. A feeling of even-keeled equanimity arose naturally, and from that place of acceptance, a sincere inquiry arose once more.
“What is really being invited here? What am I ready to accept? Show me.”
Paul let his eyes close briefly, taking another settling breath. After all, there weren’t any stupid license plates in the file room. No rustling trees, no whispering wind. No car stereo to change music mid track. No sirens, no flocks of screeching crows. Nothing but him, and a well-organized stash of office supplies. There was no room for any freakish coincidence in here.
He felt better already. Ready to move on with his day. His job. His life.
Chuckling a little at his own paranoia, Paul strolled over to grab the report he’d printed.
And froze.
A message on the copier was there waiting, front and center:
“Ready to accept another job.”
End Chapter 21
Chapter 22 will post next week. Thanks for being here in interactive real time! Comments and feedback always welcome.
In gratitude,
E.T. Allen
Just when I think Paul is going to ‘combust’ or some other catastrophic mind blowing event, he (you) leaves me standing near the precipice.
Onward please.
It doesn’t help that my husband’s name is Paul🙃.
Why, oh why can't we just choose the 'synchronicities' we're comfortable with... 🤔💭