Uncanny Signs

 

During our sojourn in France, my wife and I took a road trip from Chantilly, near Paris and Charles De Gaulle Airport, to the extreme west of France.  We saw the beaches and cemetery at Normandy, and Mont St. Michel.  It was a full day of driving and late when we started back.

My wife is the adventurous type when setting out but loses her confidence and tends to panic when things deteriorate.  So, when it got late and dark, and the roads were unfamiliar and not marked very well, she was getting nervous and concerned that we were lost.

Then the headlights picked up a small, roadside sign, concrete, shaped like an arrow pointing straight up, and crossed with a simple rectangle that said, "Chantilly."  This in the most out-of-the-way place in France.  It restored my confidence that we were going the right way, not necessarily hers, and we continued through the night back to our apartment in Chantilly.

To this day, I'm not sure that the sign even existed.  I saw it, but it was such a rudimentary sign, not official looking at all, weathered and faded, but it said, "Chantilly" and pointed ahead.  (This could be a Twilight Zone episode.)

Now, similar little things happen all the time, mostly with YouTube.  There will be a suggestion and it burrows into my psyche such that I'll try whatever and see how it goes.  

One of these was to take a combination of a drop of lemon juice and a tablespoon of olive oil before eating anything in the morning.  Another was to flatten my back against the wall and do a quarter squat to tone the muscles that control posture.

These are two that I now do routinely.  The olive oil for more than a year and the quarter squat for a few weeks.  They seem to have come onto my radar at the right time.  They' were both beneficial and the clips were not seen again after the one time.

Another, much earlier occasion of a resonant message, was when an engineering cohort said offhandedly, "Now you'll be wearing a suit every day."  This on the occasion of my transfer to a management position in the main office.  

I think I would have figured that out for myself anyway, but his remark hit home somehow, and the suits came off the rack, and home with me, one at a time over the next few months.  And that's all I wore to work for the next 30 years.

I'm not saying anything supernatural is going on.  I am, however, saying that there are, in the thousands of impressions we get every day, some that resonate with us.  Some few carry a message for which we are ready.