Chapter 8 - Aftermath

Coincidence Speaks

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After a vintage flashback to a Free Bird wedding, we now return to the latest installment of Coincidence Speaks. Please head this way to start at the beginning.↩️

Chapter 8 finds Paul in the afterglow of an electrifying experience…

Chapter 8

Aftermath

Clara breathed a huge sigh of relief.

Her husband was finally back. The worst was over, and they’d made it through an unspeakable amount of suffering together and intact. In fact, Paul was walking around with a perma-grin on his face, like a kid in a candy store, as happy and engaged as she had ever seen him.

Things weren't just back to normal, they were better than normal. 

Neither had yet realized that something had irrevocably changed, and there would be no going back. Paul’s world had been lit up by something, something massive and mysterious—and whatever this something was, life had been rocked at its very foundation.

A residual spark from the day after Christmas had taken up residence on a permanent basis. Something more than just his leg had been reconnected.

What’s more, there was an unreservedly loving feminine aspect of this something that fully accepted him—flaws and all. This wasn’t anything like that stern father figure God he’d built up out of his early upbringing, demanding supplication for the forgiveness of his inherently sinful nature.

This was something that loved him not in spite of, but because of his flaws!

With fear no longer defining his experience of the world, Paul found himself immersed within a brand new felt-sense of vital interconnection with everything around him. And it wasn’t just an intellectual appreciation. This was everything pulsing together as part of the same living, moving essence, and each new moment he was awestruck to find out he was an integral participant all over again.

The world was now alive in its own way—not just people and pets—but trees and plants and rocks and even entire landscapes had their own signature vibrancy, their own living expression. The wind and rain and the sun were pulsing creations of a visceral quintessence that was in everything, yet could not be fully defined or contained.

“I friggin’ knew it—the Force is real!” Paul laughed, his mind turning to a movie quote from Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars:

“The Force is an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us. It binds the galaxy together.” 

Apparently George Lucas had been onto something.

Shortly thereafter in the same movie, a much younger headstrong dude by the name of Han offered his two cents on the matter, deadpanning,

“Listen kid—I’ve flown from one side of this galaxy to the other. I’ve seen a lot of strange stuff. But I’ve never seen anything to make me believe there’s one all-powerful Force controlling everything. There’s no mystical energy field that controls my destiny. Anyway, it’s all a lot of simple tricks and nonsense.”

Paul Endrum had spent three decades in unquestioning agreement with Han Solo. After all, there had been little reason to believe otherwise. But post-RSD life now insisted upon something very different. He couldn’t move objects around with his mind, and his skill with a lightsaber was next to nil—but in a sudden burst of ecstatic conductivity, he could now sense an interconnective field permeating everything in a way he couldn’t even fathom was possible before. 

Paul speculated that somehow his nervous system had become so “charged” by frequent states of gratitude and joy combined with such vivid inner sensory imagery that it had resulted in some kind of spontaneous bioelectrical phenomenon. One that certainly wasn’t written about in any of the medical journals or anatomy books he’d studied during his RSD tribulations.

“Whatever is going on—I am dying to know more,” he wrote in his journal.

He wouldn’t fully grasp the irony of those words until it was too late.

Paul checked his watch as he ambled along the neighborhood bike trail, three-year-old Noel in tow, skipping while she held his hand. The second hand etched its way towards 5:15—almost time to head back for dinner.

Taking Noel’s cue, he tried out a couple fledgling skips of his own. “Just six months ago I wasn’t even fit to take care of her, and here I am, walking again...” A small outpouring of electricity pulsed within his chest, and the strange time phenomenon happened again. Instead of the second hand ticking away while the hour and minute hands were frozen in place, his awareness zoomed out and his mind’s eye saw all three hands going round and round together, tracing the clock face at different speeds, like a time-lapse recording on his phone.

But this time it didn’t stop there. Looking up from his watch, a river birch rose into the field of vision. Clara’s favorite tree.

Paul blinked.

Within the space of that blink, an entire life cycle flashed within his mind’s eye, from dark moist soil to seed to sapling to a trunk splitting itself into beautiful sprouting geometric branches and leaves, its seeds falling back into the soil… and as the tree decayed and was reabsorbed into the earth, its fractal essence continued on indefinitely, living on in the seeds of its progeny.

Paul blinked again in shock. Suddenly it was just a tree in late winter again.

“What the heck was that?”

It felt just like his normal imagination, except he wasn’t trying to imagine anything. The phenomenon seemed to be happening organically, of its own volition, toward wherever his attention was tuned. It was as if his awareness of the world would suddenly expand into a different space, a different timestream, and he would experience it simultaneously with his own.

He realized, quite viscerally, how the sheer volume of events spiraling together for just one of the ‘common’ experiences in life to occur was absolutely mind-boggling. That the world existed at all was pure miraculousness; he’d just taken it for granted before, lost in the monotone hues of ‘normal’ life, of making ends meet. When daily repetition breeds enough familiarity, novelty slowly disappears.

“Every single moment is its own timeless miracle,” Paul wrote in his journal when he got home. As soon as he read it back he saw how clichéd the sentiment was. Hardly worthy of a Hallmark card. But it didn’t matter—the truth of the feeling was indescribable.

Days and weeks began to flow together like the hands of that clockface, and Paul found himself wondering, “Maybe this is ‘enlightenment?’” Whatever that meant. He had to look it up. It wasn’t.

Everything wasn’t all hippity-dippity puppies and rainbow sandwiches, of course. Even though every moment was brand new, not all of them were pleasant. His growing daughter’s poopy diapers remained poopy diapers in all of their glory and splendor, regardless of any newfound state of timeless awe.

And after a while, Paul’s logical left brain began jutting in, a little self-righteously to be honest, first questioning and then doubting whether anything had really happened at all, whether the electric heartrending experience was really just an exceptionally vivid dream. But his ribcage and chest area continued to stay physically sore for a full month afterward, and that alone was impossible to ignore. He could still feel the residual stretch every time his lungs filled with a deep breath. 

Something real had happened.

End Chapter 8

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Chapter 9 will post Friday, April 5th. Thanks for being here in live interactive real time! Comments and feedback always welcome.

Would love to hear how you think the story is going so far, what you’d like to see more of (and/or less of!)

In gratitude,

E.T. Allen