Today's dose of madness

Reading the final pages of Fanny Howe's The Winter Sun, I was struck by the similar thread through which most of what I had read in the past days seemed to run. These materials--a number of blog posts, some really striking passages on Twitter and Facebook, another book which I had reread--all seemed to resonate with a similar theme. If I had been my younger self, I'd probably be making (thwarted) attempts at deciphering its meaning, some secret message, perhaps, that the universe is trying to deliver to me, some hidden design that would make sense out of whatever's happening in my life.

As it is, the years have taught me that coincidences like these are nothing more than what they are: coincidence. The recurring themes in our lives find their way to our everyday because our choices have made them do so. And the patterns with which we make decisions can be traced to what and how we are as individuals--our backgrounds, our experiences, our reactions to those experiences.

Hence, this seeming tapestry of words must have arisen from nothing more than a chance click (or, several chance clicks) on random links, or from my mind's proclivity for certain subjects that had made me retain only the encounters with those subjects, and that had, in turn, consigned the others into shadowed blurs.

Arrggh.

Coffee.