Intriguing, Intelligence

Over the years I've come to believe that there is an enormous intelligence operating in the universe that creates synchronicity, meaningful encounters and seemingly spontaneous connections. It's as if we're linked by a vast membrane, and if a person gently tugs or pokes that membrane then other people will sense it and respond, most likely at an unconscious level. When I was younger these events would feel quite magical to me, proof that there was more to the world than met the eye, that the hyper-rational outlook championed by my parents was insufficient to explain how life might actual work. My excitement at having sensed or experienced this invisible side to life was often met with an unimpressed, "That was just a coincidence."

Someone, or maybe a few people, must have been tugging pretty hard on the membrane yesterday because I overcome by a powerful urge to look up people I had met in Washington, D.C. while in graduate school for international relations many years ago. Over time, and as my life path took a different course, I had lost touch with them and for long stretches had not thought about my classmates at all, not even the person I dated while I was a student. In fact, I had forgotten many of their names. But with Google, Facebook and Flickr, it's not hard to find people. I typed in my ex's name and found some links, leading to images of him delivering a lecture in Europe last spring. He looked the same but seemed to have grown into his role as scholar, having dropped the playboy persona of his dissertation days. Suddenly I was back in time, remembering very specific details of my graduate school experience, including how another friend had a somewhat awkward body position when sitting on the grass in Dupont Circle. I thought most of these impressions, sights and sounds had been wiped out by the passage of time and by my willful focus on the "now". Instead, the longer I lingered in my memories of that time the more names my brain started to recall, as if all I had ever needed to do was prime the pump. After looking up a few more people I decided to go to sleep, thinking I might contact one or two of them today.

This morning, like most mornings, I logged into Google Analytics to quickly check the previous day's traffic on my website. The Analytics tools also allow me to see how people arrive at my site, either directly, by a referring website or by a key word search. And it turned out that yesterday someone had arrived at my website after entering my name AND the name of my graduate school in a search engine. While I don't know who had looked me up, I was glad to see that I was not the only person out there to feel and respond to the tug on the membrane.