I believe it's that we are more "in tuned" after we read, hear or see something unusual. Then when we see it again soon after it's just that we are more "alert" to it.

An example would be hearing a word you have never heard before, you look it up and then for 3 or 4 days in a row you notice the word.

My recent experience was...I didn't know what Edamanme Beans were. Then all of a sudden I started hearing and even saw them in the frozen food section yesterday.

MHO=

Stonewall Jackson was from West Virginia. There is a statue of him on his horse in front of the courthouse in Clarksburg. (just some trivia)

I love a good coincidence. The "Hmmmm that was weird" kind.

We had some friends here in town and we would often meet at our favorite Chinese restaurant for dinner. She ( Amy) had advanced stage diabetes and we heard that her and her husband had split up and she had moved back in with her mother and sisters so they could help care for her.
One day I was getting take out at the Chinese place and the owner and I were talking and she said Amy's husband had been in recently and told her that Amy had passed away. I felt terrible when I heard the news, when I got back to my car, for some unknown reason I turned on my radio (which I don't usually do) and the song "Amy" was playing.....
I have a feeling she was telling me something at that moment in time.....

Those are Wow moments for me. A little eerie. Particularly Stonewall Jackson. That's so left field.

I once picked up my phone to call my best friend Sue. As soon as I picked up the phone, there she was! Yet I handn't even dialed! Turns out she had dialed me and I picked it up before it even rang! That's the biggest coincidence of my life. Obviously we were both thinking of the other!

I like to think that we put thoughts "out there" and sometimes they come back in a very interesting way. That's very cool about Stonewall Jackson and Dr. Maguire. There is no way that could be coincidental. IMHO

They say it's a small world....it's also full of coincidences. I enjoy the way things "turn up" and are just there for you to wonder at. :0)

I don't really believe in coincidences either.. I like to think they are little messages reminding us that the world isn't so big. Sometimes I think they give us answers or have meaning and other times it's just a little something to make us go "WOW!".

"The Power of Flow" and "Synchronicity & You" are both good books to read if you are interested in that sort of thing. The "Power of Flow" also has a website which I've contributed a couple stories to. One was about the day we were asked to become a host family for a exchange student from Thailand. That afternoon I had had lunch with a friend and she was telling me that her brother had just arrived in Thailand for business that very day. When I got home I got a phone call from a lady I didn't even know (I'm not even sure how she got my name) asking if we wanted to host a girl from Thailand. In the few days we had to make the decision... the words Thailand and Thai came up everywhere.. I took it as a sign that we were supposed to do it (and we did!). A funny sidenote is that we had some neighbors that also took a girl from Thailand that year... I found out later that they thought it was a "sign" that we had taken one which made them decide to do it too.

Anyhow.. I keep a little journal of coincidences and ADC's. I find it very fascinating.

Here is a link that might be useful: Flow Power

Hmmm... another mystery! Sophia Clark and a statue of Stonewall in Clarksburg? All this delving into history could mean something!

LOL, okay I'm just kidding.

I think there is usually significance to those sorts of happenings (coincidences). You can look for the meaning behind them or you can look so hard until you find -some- sort of connection.

What I think is going to happen is that this has piqued your curiosity so much that you'll be learning a little bit about Stonewall Jackson in the near future. :)

That is a very eery coincidence, Stonewall Jackson is not a person I normally think about. That would get my attention.

The thing that usually happens to me is that I think of someone, usually a client, that I have not spoken to or seen for a very long time and they will then call or I will bump into them. That happens regularly.

I just thought of a coincidence I experienced that was similar to yours Alisande. I was reading a book and there was a story in it about the 1900 hurricane in Galveston. I seriously don't think I had ever even heard about that before. I set the book down and turned on the TV.. it was tuned to the History channel and a show about the 1900 hurricane in Galveston was on right then! Weird!!!

I really believe that coincidence is just that.

Elisabeth

Years ago we were on vacation in California. We live in Indiana. We had stopped to view something of interest and had gone into our camper to have a bite to eat before going on. When we opened the door to go out and a neighbor was walking by. We all had a good laught about not being able to get away from the neighbors.

I dont know if there's anything to make of coincidences. After all, there's probably a zillion "events" going on in the world at one time. It would be odd not to run into one occasionally.

My "thing" is that very often when I wonder about some once well-known person who hasn't been heard from for awhile, I read about them within a few days.

The most coincidental thing I can think of in my life was when in had a hysterectomy in 1979, the Dr. who was to give me the anesthesia (sp?) for the surgery came in to introduce himself while I was still in my hospital bed (thought that was a nice touch), & told me that while looking over my chart, he was surprised to see that we were both born in the same month & year, and on the same day. Interesting, but I doubt there was a "message" there.

Lydia, that's a perfect example!

Kfca, it clearly meant you and the anesthesiologist were separated at birth. :-)

LOL, Moonie. Here's one more: The day before, I was surprised by an unexpected visit (at work) from a girl I grew up with. Her maiden name was Clark.

One day I was with another motorcyclist at a National Park near here. As we were standing talking another motorcycle pulled up. She was a young woman from Europe. We talked and she mentioned that she was touring the US and would be for the next 4 months or so. I gave her my folks address and phone number in FL.

She contacted my folks and stayed at their house for a couple of days. We never heard anymore from her. That summer we were on vacation and were riding our motorcycles in Rocky Mountain National Park. We stopped at all the overlooks and got to the last one and I said let's just pass this one and head back. The guys wanted to stop. When I got off my bike and turned around there was the gal from Europe.

This summer we were in SD and we happened to stop in a rest area. A car came and parked next to us. I asked where they were from and they said AZ. I asked where because that is where I am from. The said Sierra Vista, which is where I live. Come to find out they live just around the corner from where we live. We had a great laugh over that.

When DD was born I shared a room with a woman who had a girl also. Within the year they moved in down the street from us. 5 Years later we moved to another city about 40 miles away. They moved to a neighboring city. Didn't find out about it until 20 years later.
Kathy G in MI

That was quite a coincidence!

I have reviewed (not extensively) written material about General Jackson due to genealogy searches on my father's side of my family. My g-great grandfather, while livng in TN, served under Jackson in the War of the Floridas, and then later after having removed to ILlinois, he was a Captain in the Black Hawk War (1832) and Jackson was president.

This family search has given me a view of American history that is unlike what I had learned as a school boy.

I don't attach any particular significance to them - they're just coincidences - some are just more uncanny than others.

Jemdandy, I think we must be talking about two different Jacksons. After reading your post, I looked up General Jackson in Wikipedia. I was surprised to learn that he was only 39 when he died. I always envisioned the Civil War leaders as being so old. Although I guess when I first learned about the Civil War, I was so young that 39 was old.

Thinking of KT discussions about old gravestones and the early deaths in the 1800s, I thought I'd share this small piece of Jackson's biography on Wikipedia:

Thomas Jackson was the third child of Julia Beckwith (née Neale) Jackson (1798  1831) and Jonathan Jackson (1790  1826), an attorney. Both of Jackson's parents were natives of Virginia. The family already had two young children and were living in Clarksburg, in what is now West Virginia, when Thomas was born. He was named for his maternal grandfather.

Thomas's sister Elizabeth (age six) died of typhoid fever on March 6, 1826, with two-year-old Thomas at her bedside. His father died of the same disease March 26. Jackson's mother gave birth to Thomas's sister Laura Ann the day after Jackson's father died.[7] Julia Jackson thus was widowed at 28 and was left with much debt and three young children (including the newborn). She sold the family's possessions to pay the debts. She declined family charity and moved into a small rented one-room house. Julia took in sewing and taught school to support herself and her three young children for about four years.

In 1830, Julia Neale Jackson remarried. Her new husband, Blake Woodson[8], an attorney, did not like his stepchildren. There were continuing financial problems. The following year, after giving birth to Thomas's half-brother, Julia died of complications, leaving her three older children orphaned.[9] Julia was buried in an unmarked grave in a homemade coffin in Westlake Cemetery along the James River and Kanawha Turnpike in Fayette County within the corporate limits of present-day Ansted, West Virginia.

I once sold a house to a woman from the Netherlands;
she came from a tiny isolated village in an area where the language was Friesian, & she moved to Waxahachie, Texas.

One day when she was in the book store, she heard someone speaking Friesian-
turned out to be a guy who had grown up in her very same village!

Random events are happening constantly.. It's possible for a person to MAKE connections, but he or she is CREATING the connection between random events.

Remember all the nonsense creating supposedly meaningful connections to the Lincoln and Kennedy assinations?

This reminds me of the adage, "Figures can't lie, but liars can figure." It's the *person* who claims that something random is meaningful. (I'm not saying they are lying, BTW.)

Never mess with anyone's BELIEFS. That's an argument you cannot win.

I got my first real office job when I was 18 years old. For a mortgage company. I became best friends with a girl there. We hung out together for about 17 years. When DH and I decided to move to the Central Coast to be near his family she and I lost contact. We did not speak for about 13 years. About a year ago I guess I discovered FaceBook. Now mostly I just keep in contact with friends from the KT, family and my stitching buddies. I got a friend request from the girl in California one day. Turns out she lives only an hour from me now. The same distance as in California! We have been in touch ever since and she even came to visit when Jim had his heart attack in May. We picked up right where we left off.

Trish

My mother and father bought groceries at a supermarket where the lady who usually checked them out, was from North Carolina, as were my parents. They told her they were getting ready to go back to NC for a visit. The lady said she wished she could go and see her mother, she still lived there.

My parents were in NC and walking across a parking lot. A lady needed help of some kind. I can't remember now just what it was...has been over 45 years ago. Anyway, my father went to help, and as it turned out, it was the lady who checked their groceries, mother.

Now, that's a coincidence.

I hadn't seen or talked to a cousin since our grandmothers funeral. We are exactly the same age and live near each other but never were that close as kids. Many years later, I had a dream about her in the early morning hours and I was awakened by a phone call, and the voice said..you'll never guess who this is, and it was the cousin. Blew me away but I never told her about the dream. Thought she'd think I was nuts>>>>A smaller coincidence. I am reading some new books by some of my favorite authors and three of the consecutive ones have Tessa as a main character. And that's an uncommon name.

They happen to me constantly, so much so that I started writing them down. Getting people to believe them fully is another thing.

I put it down to my world being so closed and small that things are bound to overlap. But the post above suggesting that we're paying closer to certain things makes a lot of sense.

One example is one day I was driving home and had never heard of a water business that was being advertised on the radio. As soon as the name was mentioned a man ran across the street in front of me wearing a t-shirt with the exact business name on it. yup, the phone numbers matched too, lol.