I've been tracking personal coincidences, and they've been coming almost regularly, roughly twice a week.
Thinking about it mathematically, the totality of succinctly verbalizable ideas available is finite--just as an estimate I would say one million atomic ideas, and then if you allow modification by an adjective, then maybe a million million simple concepts in the idea space.
The actual number is probably much smaller, as the English language has less than one million words, and many of the word combinations are nonsense.
So say about one million simple concepts altogether.
And instead of working down from the high side, we can work up from the low side. Basic fluency in a language requires knowing about 2,000 words. Noun x modifier would then have roughly a quarter million different combinations--assuming one-fourth of the vocabulary was nouns, and another fourth was adjectives. Again, many of the combinations would be nonsense; almost unthinkable.
For a coincidence, the same somewhat obscure item has to appear twice within a reasonably short time.
I read a lot, and I have a lot going on around me, but not nearly enough to be expecting this sort of coincidence regularly.
I also don't recall noticing so many coincidences in years before 2020 or 2021, although in retrospect I do see a few oddities scattered across earlier decades.
Some of the coincidences that have come up recently are very striking, and a number of these are best attributed to God.
A boomer apologizes, albeit without much clarity.
"It is not meet to take the children's bread, and to cast it to dogs," Jesus said; Matthew 15:26.
I recently understood that I am spending my life in rebuilding spiritual and practical foundations that had been foolishly undermined by previous generations.
Several months ago I was reading a nonfiction book by Christian author Paul Tournier, and made it about three-quarters of the way through before being drawn away to other things.
When I picked it up this last week and finished reading it, I found references to about a dozen Bible passages that had come up in my daily Bible readings in the interim, mostly obscure Old Testament personages with a variety of afflictions; Tournier was a Swiss doctor famous for connecting his Christianity with his medical practice.
I also read a Christian fiction book this last week: Deadline, by Randy Alcorn. One day, what I read in the book mirrored my morning Bible reading on that same day.
"A work of creation was three-fold, an earthly trinity to match the heavenly; the Creative Idea, timeless and passionate, which is the image of the Father; the Creative Energy, begotten of the idea and working in time, which is the image of the Word; the Creative Power, the meaning of the work and its response in the individual soul, which is the image of the indwelling Spirit."
-- P. D. James, summarizing Dorothy L. Sayers' description
