The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times(52)

“You looked up,” I said, “when you talked of an outside force.”

“Well, it’s not down there,” Jane said, pointing to the ground and grinning.

“So you just empty your mind and somehow trust that whatever that spiritual power is, it will somehow get you through the talk?” I asked. “And then in a sense you become a channel—you open yourself up to a wisdom that’s greater than your own?”

“Well, yes, for sure. There’s a wisdom that’s far, far, far greater than my own. I was so thrilled when I found that the great scientist Albert Einstein, one of the most brilliant minds of the twentieth century, came to the same conclusion based on pure science. He said it was the harmony of natural law—it’s a terrific quote, actually.”

I started to respond but noticed Jane had suddenly looked away with a worried expression on her face. “Doug, I am sorry to interrupt here, but I see the robin on my bird table looking in through the window. He’ll be angry if I don’t feed him!”

“A bird table?” I asked.

“It’s a little platform attached to the sill of my attic bedroom window,” Jane said, still looking away to her left.

“Why don’t you see if you can google that Einstein quote while I feed him. It’s in his book The World As I See It.”

While Jane was gone, I looked it up. And there it was, in the book Jane suggested: “The harmony of natural law … reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection.”

I thought about this quote in the context of all we had talked about that day, and it occurred to me that as Jane followed her extraordinary path through life there must have been either some lucky coincidences, or she could have been guided by this superior intelligence that Einstein believed in. When Jane returned, I read out the full quote and then asked her, “So do you think you’re being guided by this superior intelligence, or do you think good old coincidence plays a role in directing your journey—all of our journeys?”





Was It Coincidence?



“I simply cannot believe in coincidences, not anymore,” Jane said without hesitation.

“Why not?”

“Well, a coincidence implies a random event occurring in juxtaposition with something happening in your life—and I can’t believe that all of the seeming coincidences in our lives are random. It’s more as if they are offering us opportunities. I’ve had so many strange experiences.”

“Like what?”

“One of them saved my life. It was during the war and Mum had taken Judy and me for a holiday—very close to home but where there was a stretch of beach where we could actually paddle as there was a small gap in the barbed wire defenses. We were staying in a little guest house—lunch was at twelve o’clock and if you were late, too bad. No lunch. On this one day Mum insisted on walking back a very long way round, involving crossing some sand dunes and going through a little wood. Which meant, we complained, that we would miss lunch. But she was adamant, so reluctantly we had to agree.

“When we were halfway back I distinctly remember looking up into the very blue sky and seeing a plane high, high up. And as I watched, two black cigar-shaped objects fell, one from each side of the plane. Mum urgently told us to lie flat in the sand and she sort of lay on top of us. Next thing there were two terrific explosions. It was very frightening. And afterward we saw that one of the bombs had made a great crater right in the middle of the lane—just where we would have been had we taken the route we had taken every other day.

“So—was it ‘coincidence’ that Mum decided to go that way? She had a murmuring valve in her heart and always avoided long walks.”

“Did she tell you what prompted her to take that route?” I asked.

“No, she never liked to talk about it. But it was as though she had a sixth sense. There was another time when she crossed London during the Blitz to get her sister Olly out of hospital—both her legs were in a plaster cast after some operation. Mum had a terrible job to get her back to Bournemouth through war-torn Britain. Everyone thought she was crazy. The next day a bomb fell on the hospital—or maybe it was a nursing home. There is no one I can ask now.”

“Can you explain this sixth sense?”

“Not really—it seems like mind reaching out to mind. Maybe Mum sensed the presence of the German pilots in that bomber, or had a premonition of the bomb that could have killed Olly. And there was another thing. She was very fond of my father’s brother, and one evening, here in Bournemouth when she was having a bath, she suddenly screamed out his name and then started crying. Later she found it was the exact time when his plane was shot down and he was killed.”

I wondered why Jane’s mother did not like to talk about her sixth sense, and Jane said she found it spooky.

“I’ve got another story about this kind of coincidence. It was when Grub was in boarding school in England, on the night my husband, Derek, died, far away in Tanzania.

“Grub had the same kind of premonition. It came to him in a strange way. He woke suddenly from a dream in which Olly had arrived at the school and said, ‘Grub, I have something very sad to tell you. Derek died last night.’ He had the dream three times, and the third time he went to the school matron to tell her that he was having terrible nightmares. In the morning, Olly arrived at the school and took him into the garden. She said, ‘Grub, I have something very sad to tell you.’ Grub said, ‘I know, Derek is dead.’”