California Dreaming

Yesterday I booked a flight to California.

My uncle passed away last week, and so I’m escorting my mom down to the memorial service.

On my big long list of “things to accomplish on my career break” I’d actually listed “take a weekend trip with one or both of my parents” and as it turns out I’m taking a weekend trip to California with one of my parents. It wasn’t exactly the getaway I’d envisioned three months ago when I was drafting that idea list, but life has a funny way of twisting around and mapping out realities for each of us.

I just wrote a different post about quantum mortality and free will and my intention in that post was to steer my little essay into some words about fate and coincidence and all that jibber-jabber, but in the end I don’t think it’s super-relevant: with a big enough data set on a long enough timeline, coincidences become statistical likelihoods.

In other words, if I had created a list called “3 things to do on my career break” and one of those things was “travel to California with my mom” … and three months later I was booking flights to an unexpected funeral for a sad but important visit to see the family, then yeah we could be gaping in awe at the coincidence. But I made a list that actually has one hundred and two things on it, and some of them are pretty vague, so the fact that one of those has manifested into reality is a scenario that could have played out in hundreds to the power of ten interesting ways, so… almost inevitable, right?

So, I’m going to California.

And then a few weeks after that I’m going to Illinois.

And we just kinda got back from the UK, France and Italy.

And for a guy without a job and no income, I somehow am getting around the continent and the world these days.

Coincidence? Nah.