What Does it all Mean?

Most of us have been touched at some time in our lives, probably more than once, by remarkable examples of coincidence.

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Maybe you and your partner have been at a function, and discovered during the course of conversation that the couple you have just met share your wedding anniversary.  Or perhaps it turns out that the new friend you have been dancing next to at a festival has siblings (and a dog!) with the same names as yours. 

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Either of these would likely be stories you would, at least for a week or two, regard as being worthy of recounting to others.  But over time you would probably consign the coincidence to being one of life’s curiosities, rather than something of mystical significance.

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About eight years ago Linda, Tim, Ben and I were in Turkey on a tour to the Gallipoli Peninsula when we found ourselves eating lunch at the same restaurant as our best man, his wife and their son.  The restaurant was in the middle of nowhere, roughly halfway between Istanbul and Anzac Cove.  Although we had known ahead of time that Simon, Fiona and David would be in the same part of the world as us at around the same time, the idea that we would actually run into one another without pre-arranging the meeting place seemed, at the time, almost unbelievable.  As the years have passed this example of happenstance seems progressively less incredible however.

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Just as it now seems unremarkable that my Year 7 class at high school contained two boys, unrelated to one another, with a relatively unusual surname.

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Even the case of a man I once knew well, born on the same day of the year as his father, and whose wife subsequently delivered a son on that very same day of the year, seems these days to be well within the realms of realistic plausibility – it happened after all!  My basic knowledge of mathematical probability suggests the chances of this occurring are a little less than one in 130,000 – so that in fact there are almost certainly a number of others within Australia, let alone the world, who regularly blow out candles, and cut cake, on the same day as both their parent and child do.

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So what, in time, will I make of the stories I intend to share with you on this page, all of which revolve in some way around Ben?  Are they as inexplicable as they presently appear – to me at least.  That is to say, are they just, like the instances given above, coincidences that will ultimately be viewed as, at best, mildly entertaining dinner party conversation.  Or are they something more?

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I intend to let you be the judge, and I very much look forward to receiving your thoughts and feedback.