A Coin Toss

If you’re anything like me (and you probably are, in the sense I’m about to mention, anyway), when you undress at night for bed, you remove all the items from your pockets—wallet, keys, loose change, comb—and drop them on the dresser or table. Nothing uncommon about that. We perform hundreds of such actions every day without having to think about them. However, when I went to return these items to my pockets after dressing this morning, I could not help but notice that the coins were neatly lined up in two rows, the top row containing three coins, the bottom four. Or perhaps I should not say ‘top’ and ‘bottom’, for the assignment would be arbitrary and would depend upon one’s perspective. In any case, there were two rows, each row neatly laid out, with visually equal spaces between each coin and with each row corresponding to the other in positional symmetry.

One may suppose any one of three things: 1) that the coins simply fell in this manner at random when I dropped them on the dresser the night before, 2) that I carefully arranged the coins when I dropped them, and have simply not remembered having done so, or 3) that they were arranged by some other force outside of my knowledge or will—say a ghost, or a flesh and blood agent who had entered the house during the night whilst I slept in order to carefully position the seven coins.

Now, the feasibility of #3 seems very distant indeed, so far so as to be absurd. Even if you disregard the fact that the door was locked and would have required a forced entry, you’re still left with the very unlikely supposition that an intruder bent on arranging coins is loose in the neighborhood.

Number 2 is only slightly more possible. I am forgetful, I will admit; but on the other hand, I have never been given to arranging the position of inanimate objects (or even animate ones). Any one of my wives could tell you that. The refrigerator could be in the middle of a room and it wouldn’t bother me, as long as it was plugged in. It is difficult enough for me to arrange for the dirty socks to go into the laundry basket rather than a dusty corner. Therefore, if I were to do something so perfectly unusual for me, I am inclined to think that I would remember the act, which itself must have required particular attention, given the apparently premeditated symmetry of the thing.

Now, it may be, as in #1, that the coins simply fell as I found them the next day and that the vertical and horizontal symmetry as well as the equidistance between each coin in each row, each row in relation to the other, was purely accidental. It just happened that way. One may presume that among the nearly countless times one drops his coins on the dresser, there will be one in which a sort of perfection of Platonic Form is achieved.  Well, one may, if he really wants to.

There is much that may be in this manner. The dragonfly that occasionally hovers in the corner where Sparky (the dog, now deceased) used to sleep may do so coincidentally (and time after time). It may be that the little bird with the yellow head that hopped onto my toe the other day (quite unlike any bird with any color of head) did so quite randomly nonetheless. Of the thousands of times he has landed, in the thousands of spots, this time he just happened to land on my toe. Never mind that I had just the day previously been writing about little birds with yellow heads pecking at ashes in a firepit (else we must presume causation between what I wrote and the appearance of a bird similar to the ones I wrote about). On the many occasions that another bird altogether defecates from the high branches of a tree, there may be that one time which finds me sitting directly below his perch, and thus the accidental target of his bodily expulsion. That I had for weeks been suffering a relentless headache, and that the headache suddenly vanished when the bird shit on my head, may be nothing more than a coincidence appended to a coincidence. Maybe. Of the many times that one sees a wild deer in the forest, there may be that one time when the wild deer suddenly and explicably turns into a tame deer and quite unlike a deer accompanies you on the trail, suffers being petted, hangs out with your party while you picnic. The fact that it actually happened so can only mean that it could happen so.

But why?

Accident would say that there is no why. And yet the very nature of the thing seems to demand our attention. Why have the coins fallen just so, when nature itself resists any such symmetry? Why does the dragonfly not hover in some other corner? Why did the bird, who so appeared like the bird I had written about, land on my toe rather than anywhere else in the world? Why did the deer discard his very nature, which would have compelled him to leap away in frantic bounds, and instead walk with us side-by-side without the least hint of reticence?

I suspect that there is a fourth option. I suspect that the world is full of meaning in each moment, and that this sort of meaning speaks a language of its own, a language that we cannot speak, yet nonetheless  know. I suspect that the cosmos both knows and seeks us, and seeks us for our own sake. The language is not reducible to words, interaction is not reducible to concept. It is not there to be explained, but rather to be observed, incorporated, ingested, treasured. In such a way, the spirit feeds and grows, and learns the whereabouts of the greenest pastures and of all the most potent seeds.