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from Reincarnation Through Common Sense by Doug "Ten" Rose
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Just a CoIncidence
I just spent an hour trying to get the electric light to go on in the cabin.
I fooled with it a bit but no go. Monk Bet lives right next door, down the
hill about twenty yards or so. He is the house electrician here in both the
physical and metaphysical senses.
It is too
late in the evening to bother him now. We all did more physical work than
usual today. He’s probably resting and may even be sleeping. It seems best
to just write myself a note. “Ask Bet to please look at the light tomorrow.”
OK, done.
I’ll give
the light switch that one last “goof flick” and go to sleep. Most folks will
do the goof flick thing. You know what I mean. When something’s broken and
you’ve resigned yourself to the fact that it’s not going to work, you give
the switch one more flick just to show yourself that you’ve tried everything
possible. Doing this makes the effort to get the thing working officially
over and closes the case. I thought to myself, “No problem. Darkness is
cool. Nice change of pace,” as I gave the switch a goof flick.
The light
came on as if there was never a problem. It seemed to have fixed itself—or
did it?
Monk Bet has never come to my cabin during the months I’ve lived here. Five
minutes after the light came on, he knocked on my door. With a wide, sly
smile he shrugged a communication that there was nothing special about his
being there and said two of the dozen or so words that he can almost
pronounce in English. “Chus visteg.” (“Just visiting.”) I invited him in. He
had a light bulb with him.
With a
wide, satisfied grin Bet looked up at my working light for longer than was
sensible and then winked at me as if he was proud of himself. He lifted his
right hand to show me the burnt out light bulb that he held in it. He shook
it next to my ear so that I could hear the tinkle of its broken filament and
then threw it in the trash bag.
How the hell did he change the light bulb before coming into the cabin?
It seems he
wasn’t as tired as I had thought.
Most of you
will say, “It’s just a coincidence.”
I agree.
But we
don’t all get the same meaning from that word, do we? “Co-incidence” may not
always be the innocent bystander that we suppose it to be.
Bet decided
that we should go uphill to visit Monk Mee. I thought it a bit late for
visteg, but was glad to be asked along. We left the light on in my cabin. It
glowed through the hole-in-the-wall window. I looked back at it in stunned
amazement. All evidence suggested that Bet had somehow replaced that light
bulb without being in the cabin.
Monk Mee was awake. He was trying to get a little radio I had loaned him to
work.
It had a
problem in the switch.
Bet fixed
it.
As I once heard a Native American say, “Coincidence may just be The Great
Spirit’s wish to remain anonymous.”
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