Thirty Thirty-nine (Majo John Madden, 9/15/07)

I love funky numbers – numbers that should be random, but come up looking like they are not. It seems to me that life uses these synchronicities, like others, to get our attention - to say: “Hey, wake up, pay attention. You may think that life is all chaos, but it’s not.” And I seem to see these kinds of fun, synchronistic numbers all the time.

Today at the gas station, I pointed out to the cashier (whom I know, a sweet older lady named Helen) that the total on the cash register from her previous customer was $66.99. “That’s a cool number. I like numbers and that’s a good one.” Helen, I think, is not into numbers quite as much as I. “Well, I guess it is. But yours is not as interesting.” The total from my gas purchase was $30.39. “No, that’s a pretty boring number.”

After the gas station, my next bit of shopping was at the health food store. When the cashier there rang up the total of my several purchases, with tax, the cash register showed $30.39.

Sometimes the deeper patterns under the surface chaos of things are not obvious – sometimes they never clarify themselves. But other times they need a little more distance to manifest. We need to step back a bit, get the view from 3000 feet rather than 30. Sometimes this “bigger picture” has to do not with physical distance, but a broader timeframe. In that first moment at the gas station, $30.39 seemed pretty unremarkable. It took the one-hour picture to show up that pattern.

And, obviously, some of these patterns require bigger time frames to show up. About thirty years ago, I was teaching a course on dreams. As I immersed myself in the topic, I kept (as I had during other periods) a notebook by my bed and journaled every dream I could remember. The further I got into this process, my unconscious seemed to cooperate by waking me up after each of several dreams per night. Often I would have one dream about a particular theme on a specific night – but then would return to this same theme on maybe my third dream of the night on several consecutive nights. Somehow, this little part of my unconscious was more organized and orderly than I might have expected.

It seems to me that the primary requirement to see these patterns is to really pay attention to the details of our “mundane” daily experience. The writer’s eye certainly helps with this, but anybody can cultivate the habit of more opening their eyes to the present moment. This heightened awareness of the here-and-now is actually the primary spiritual discipline and, in and of itself, is likely to add more depth, charm, fun and aliveness to our days.

And one of the ways this awareness discipline will enrich our days is by life winking at us as it points our attention to more of the thirty thirty-nines in our environment.