I have a fun suggestion. Try removing just one word from your speech or thoughts for one month. If the word comes up, as it will naturally do, dismiss it quickly, as if it never happened. The word is banished to a verbal purgatory, along with swear words in front of your mother. The word is… “coincidence”

Let’s say that you make the decision to do this, then you plan a trip to the dentist. On the BART train you notice a man dressed in black, shaved head, and a bar-code tattooed on the back of his neck. Later, after a successful teeth cleaning you head through the lobby, and you notice a bald man, dressed in black, with a bar-code tattoo on the back of his neck.

Normally you might say this is a coincidence, but you can’t say this because for at least a month the word doesn’t exist for you.

Then you decide to jump on and off BART several times, catch bus transfer, walk through the busiest shopping center, before paying cash at the nearest motel. And you are still alive in the morning.

I have removed the word “coincidence” for the last ten years. I have found new meanings to the things I see and hear, spending a lot of time analyzing the “agencies” behind the events.

Just now while driving home, I noticed dozens of yellow daisies growing on the corner lot. I looked at them only in passing, but I noticed them. I’m not a nectar seeking insect, also, I do not collect pollen. But the agency of the flower had created an explosion of color that caught my attention.

For millennia, when the early humans looked up, they witnessed two lights in the sky, one that ruled the day, and one that ruled the night. Stories were made up about these objects, some of the facts were confused. They appear to us to be the same size, and it took thousands of years to learn that the night orb was not generating light, but merely reflecting light from the sun.

In textbooks they often say it’s an amazing coincidence that the moon and the sun were almost the exact size from our perspective. It took years for us to accept the fact that the sun is slightly over 400 times the size of the moon.

For us, the occasional eclipse proves that they are essentially the same size. In a thousand years it might be slightly different, but in this early science years it was said to be a coincidence. What agency determined this?

As far as we know, planets don’t decide to make a moon the exact size of the sun as seen from the surface. So what agency is responsible? How often does this random relationship occur in infinite galaxies?

If this is by design, what are we expected to learn by the viewed relationship?

Perhaps the intention all along was to encourage questioning, noticing things and then trying to find the purpose, instead of labeling it “coincidence