I had written and published the second part of this work months prior, before I realised on Wednesday at exactly 12:46am while lounging with a lover. She visited my Medium page, picked that one out and read it out loud, and then I realised I had somehow put out the second and final part for months now without the first, which was sitting in my Substack drafts.
But yes, here I am putting out the first part of the work ‘Myth of Coincidence’.
Somehow, the chaos in my life is never-ending, but then I have made a firm resolve to steer my situation to my favour despite the chaos.
Regarding coincidence, its application largely is similar to the way we use a spare key as something to reach for when nothing else fits. Two strangers discover they share a birthday. A song plays at precisely the moment that matches your mood. You think of someone you haven’t spoken to in three years, and your phone buzzes with their name. You have unprotected sex, and suddenly you are seeing sexually transmitted disease treatment adverts. Coincidence, we say, and move on.
The word functions as a full stop.
It closes the inquiry before it has properly begun, and we are satisfied with this because the alternative that things are connected in ways we cannot immediately explain is far more unsettling than randomness. Yes, I have confronted this feeling several times, and let me tell you, it is gut-wrenching, but it is far better than ignorance.
Randomness, at least, requires nothing of us. Meaning does.
Growing up in a religious home in Nigeria and attending the church and mosque sermons exposed me to how clerics would ascribe world events, most often catastrophic, to an unseen force. The preachers would even go as far as saying that events occurring in our environment just happen because they did, and we had no business questioning it. In contrast to this, other curious societies probed the issues and engineered solutions or treated the matter accordingly.
I know a reader out there is able to relate and probably witness, or even perhaps be a victim of, the weaponisation of religion by both its leaders and followers in respect to this matter.
We shall not exclude the education system in this context. I will be particular about the education system I have been privileged to obtain in the United Kingdom and Nigeria, respectively. Education systems, particularly colonial ones, are built on a very specific idea of cause and effect. Work hard, follow the prescribed path, and get the prescribed outcome.
But anyone who has actually moved through the Nigerian system and then encountered the British one understands that the relationship between effort and reward is often far more complicated, far more arbitrary, and far more shaped by forces the student was never told to account for. Class. Resources. Access. Who your people are. Which school’s name sits on your certificate? And much more as opposed to a publicly acknowledged path.
I remember subsequently being successful in my post-UTME, JAMB and WAEC but still did not make it into the university. I remember vividly being told it was a coincidence or error of some sort and a rewrite of an examination was necessary. I also remember refuting such a claim and pointing fingers at the decaying system that had been largely monetised. which, of course, was no longer a secret in Nigerian society. In contrast to the British system, a peculiar experience stands out for me while studying at Southwark College. On this day in a criminal law class, the lecturer discussed at length issues regarding crimes and the English system’s approach to crimes.
In the middle of the lecture, she paused and asked about the benefits of war to society and the world at large. I was taken aback for a moment; while still processing the question, I looked around, and hands were raised with answers that were rendered by the students. I never before that point in my life thought that war was beneficial. There and then I realised someone wanted this taught to students, and so it was. Eventually my private investigation led me right to the source.
So the question becomes: when a student fails or succeeds in that system, is it a coincidence? Is it merit? Or is it the harvest of decisions made long before that student was born by governments, by colonial administrators, or by families navigating systems designed with someone else in mind?
I often suspected that the idea of coincidence most of the individuals around me bore was simply a reaction to an action, often in combination with a pattern. The nature, timing and how far-reaching the action is and the reaction to the action are what leave many of us in a rabbit hole of curiosity, questioning and puzzlement.
This gap really is not to be overlooked in an era like the present one, where information and research have become reachable to the majority of the global populace. This gap can be filled up by anyone willing to take it on.
But for the conscious reader, I must leave you with this: the physical realm we dwell in and call Earth is not the beginning nor the end of all that there is. At the root of this statement rests accountability, almost as if inseparable from what many of us know as coincidence. Part two of this work establishes this matter.
Thus, I must expand your reasoning on this matter. Taking into account the instance of the building that is placed brick by brick, the expectation of the builder as he places and binds every brick together is that of a proposed or imagined plan of a structure presented by an architect or proposer. Hence, the consequence of the architect’s, proposer’s and builder’s work is a structure for whatever purpose it was designed for.
Similar to the instance of an event of a book, war, infrastructure, death, pain, money, joy, nature, life, economy, and needs, amongst others, are not just mere or coincidental events or activities. They are the reactions or consequences of action taken.
What I have come to believe is that coincidence is less a phenomenon than a habit of perception. We notice a pattern and feel a mild shock of recognition; then, almost immediately, we reach for the word that will dissolve the shock and return us to comfort. Coincidence. The shock passes. We stop looking. Although I suspect the larger part of the growing population has outgrown that.
But the pattern remains.
Consider what changes when attention is paid. The collector who catalogues their library begins to notice which books arrived in which years and what those years meant to them. The writer who traces their influences finds that what looked like a series of random discoveries was in fact a single long conversation, conducted across decades, with a chorus of minds who were asking the same questions from different centuries. The student who notices the hand-printed words on their textbooks and exercise books. None of this is visible to the person who is not looking. All of it is visible, almost embarrassingly so, to the person who is.
But there is a meaningful difference between accepting that some things are random and using randomness as a first resort as the default explanation applied before any real looking has been done. Most of us do the latter. Which is essentially what this piece seeks to admonish about the danger of.
We call things ‘coincidence’ not after investigation but instead of investigating. The label is applied at the moment of noticing, which is precisely the moment when inquiry ought to begin. The consequence of this is visible in society, even further encouraged, and I am of the opinion that it is now a cumbersome issue to take on. In a broader context, this inquiry, when not shunned, misdirected or stunted, leads to understanding and thus application in important contexts.
I published part two of this work before part one. For months, it existed in that form: a conclusion without a beginning, an answer suspended in the air with further questions or no question beneath it. And yet, in that time, people read it. Some found it useful. A few readers wrote to say it had arrived at the right moment.
Perhaps the sequence was never the point. Perhaps what looked like disorder was simply a different kind of order, one I did not have the vantage point to see until a Wednesday morning, at 12:46am, when my own words were read back to me and I finally heard what they were saying.
I would like to think that it was not a coincidence.
Part Two is already out there waiting for you.
Leave a Reply