Fortune Cookies

I never put much stock in fortune cookies, until about 20 years ago.

My friend Mark and I were having lunch in a nice, very informal little Chinese restaurant just down the street from me. (If there were such a thing as a Chinese diner, this would have been it.) Mark and I had a fairly strong relationship, including him at one point renting office space from me in my really too-large office suite – and also, after his girlfriend threw him out, staying with me for a while in my equally-too-large rented farmhouse on a lovely piece of land about 15 minutes from downtown Syracuse, NY. (One of the joys of Syracuse – which almost made up for the long, snowy winters – was having such easy access to nice country.)

Taking in housemates helped my social needs – and helped me pay the rent. The house also had a huge living room, which I used to host a variety of personal growth workshops. I even gave the place a cute little name, Harmony Farm, and a nice little map that showed it as being located halfway between Syracuse and California.

Mark had moved back into town – he was essentially a city boy, who mostly did not appreciate our idyllic, bucolic location. As we finished our meal, he was asking me how things were going out at Harmony Farm. I was exactly in the middle of telling him how much I liked my current housemate and how good the vibe was out there, when I opened a fortune cookie that said, "Harmony in the home”. Now that got my attention. If it had said, “Happiness in the home”, “Harmony in your life”, etc., it would not have seemed like such extraordinary synchronicity. I started paying more attention to these little strips of white paper inside these virtually inedible crunchy little cookies (with mostly nothing better for dessert in the typical Chinese restaurant).

Over the next many years, I got some fortunes that seemed stupid and irrelevant and some that genuinely strove to be meaningful, but related to my life in no way that I could come up with. And some real winners. Actually, well more than half the fortunes I have opened up since then have seemed interesting at least – and many that have hit me right between the eyes, that have seemed at least as much tailored for my specific life situation as that original “Harmony” fortune.
In the last 20 years, I have almost always had one or more cool fortunes taped above my desk. My current posted fortune was opened about two years ago, shortly after moving from Chicago to Asheville, NC. Part of what kept me going in this new town, where I moved knowing not one soul, was the constant support and well-wishing from my friends back in Chicago and other parts of the country. This fortune said, “Friends all joy in your success.” I suppose that could have fit for lots of people, but it seemed especially meaningful to me. Not the kind of knockout synchronicity as “Harmony in the home”, but I still really liked it.

A few months ago, a customer at the gas station where I was working as a cashier, came up eating one of those little Dove chocolates, individually wrapped in foil – and gave me three. (She was a regular and did, I think, already know of my monster sweet tooth.) These individual chocolates carry their own little fortunes, inscribed on the inside of the foil.

The three she gave me were pretty amazing.

I was at that point facing some pretty significant challenges in my life – more even than usual – and was consciously struggling to embrace this juncture, to trust that nothing was going wrong, that life really only meant me well. So the first little enfoiled message said, “Dare to love completely.” Again, really something that could be meaningful to anyone at any point in his or her life, but I liked it a lot.

The second felt even more specifically pointed towards me. In the context of all these life challenges, this guy who usually would be characterized as a go-with-the-flow type, was telling my friends that I was pushing hard to get through this period, that it seemed I needed to, if I was possibly going to reach some calmer, easier shore. So this little chocolaty message (chocolate being my favorite food group, by a long shot) said, “Go against the grain.” This seemed a lot less generic than loving completely – and I could think of no previous period in my life when this message would have fit for me.

But it was the third message that totally knocked my socks off, that left me giving the other fortunes even more credence.

I for many years have not liked red clothes. I was told by someone along the way that my natural coloring was winter, or something like that, and that red was not a good color for me. And, with my ruddy Irish complexion, red – especially shirts – never looked good on me. (I suppose red pants would not have looked all that great, either.)

But there I was, standing at the window of our little booth at this gas station, wearing my red uniform shirt. So this fortune says, “Guess what, you look good in red”!! Now, how the hell do I explain that? Even the sassy little introduction, “Guess what”, seemed to emphasize that life was having a great little joke with me. I immediately, after shaking my head and walking around the little booth, muttering something like “Now, how in the hell…?”, taped that round little bit of foil above the window. My two colleagues, neither of whom liked our uniform shirts, got a kick out of it, too.

So, now I repeat, “How in the hell…?” – or maybe heaven. I left that fortune at the gas station and took the other two home, where they still adorn the top of my bathroom mirror. Since I got through that especially difficult period, I’m not sure that “Go against the grain” still has significance for me, but it feels like it somehow does. Maybe not so globally as to fight against the difficulty of my life, but for those moments when going with the flow truly does not feel like the right response.

And “Dare to love completely” remains a key little mantra for me. Again, probably a nice bit of coaching for anyone, at any point in their life, but – paired with that crazy little message about looking good in red – my response is basically, “OK, life, I get the message.”

Now, I’ll say it again, “How in the heaven…?” What’s going on here? Is there something especially magical about fortune cookies and Dove chocolates? I don’t think so.

I really do believe that synchronicity is everywhere around us, all the time – we just don’t see it or pay any attention to it. Then sometimes we do pay attention. I’ve written in an earlier post how birds sometimes get my attention – how seeing a particular favorite bird (especially ones you don’t see every day, like great blue herons) at a particular moment seems to signal something like, “It’s ok, the truth of life is not the chaos you now see. Everything is connected and you can trust the moment”. And that’s how I think fortune cookies work. Birds get my attention because I have invested them with synchronistic properties. Fortune cookies get my attention because they claim to have significant little messages.

But the truth, I more and more believe, is that all of life is always astonishingly, magically interwoven – and that sometimes we are just more in tune, or more needing to have life get our attention. It certainly is clear to me that the more I read about, write about, journal about synchronicity, the more I see it all around me. Call me a goof, a budding mystic, or simply more and more recognizing the underlying truth of life – call me whatever, these fortunes, foil wrappers and birds really do work for me.