(Continued from above) 

As she fell, I heard her brother yell "Noooooooooooo!" 

Let me put the story on pause, hold that image, and leap forward into the future. In a moment you will see the connection. 

     Flash forward to Labor Day weekend 22 years later, I had spent the last three days in bed, recovering from a wicked electrical shock. I had been helping two friends who were recent immigrants from Tibet move a ladder in a house painting job and the ladder went into a power line. Ouch. 

     Since I had a near death experience before, I knew that I would have three days of walking around in a fog, unable to think clearly, but somehow with a heightened awareness of personal energy.  I had been a single dad for 7 years and my 12 year old son Daniel had grown into a competent cook, cleaner, handyman and helper. He offered to take me out to my favorite physical therapy - hitting a bucket of golf balls. 

     As we concluded our hour of vigorous but humiliating exercise we headed into the club house. Blocking the entry was a group of volunteers setting up a charity golf tournament. Being a professional fundraiser, I donate to almost everything. I asked the first person that I encountered I where could I go to make a donation. She extended her right hand towards me with her palm up, and motioned silently to come follow her. Intimidated, I scurried along quickly. In the eye of the hurricane of chaos was a calm woman with a stack of T-shirts and a roll of tickets and a cash box.         

     "Jennifer, would you please sell this gentleman a T-shirt?", "Sure mom" she replied. Mom then curtly smiled at me and left. Jennifer looked up with skeptical raised eyebrows, with a glance left and right, speaking wordlessly some kind of message like "Hey we are not open for business yet, but I will do you a favor." "What is this charitable organization?" I asked. She pushed a folded T-shirt towards me with Redemptorist Senior Center in bold letters across the chest, and glanced up with the same skeptical raised eyebrows and half smile as if to say "Do you have a hangover, or are you just really bad at making small talk?"   

      I interpreted this as an invitation to make small talk. She looked like she was 28 years old, therefore not a resident of the senior center, so I was curious of her connection. As she described her volunteer work, and the connection between the senior center and her work as a first grade teacher I began to sense a glow around her. I wanted to hear more, and absorb some of her glow, so I asked if I could also buy a raffle ticket. Then, do you have anything else for sale? Again, I saw her half smile, half raised eyebrows, which spoke volumes, mainly expressing pity for my modest abilities to make small talk. 

     Leap forward two days, I was in the office of Fr. Shea, who had set up an interview to discuss hiring me to run a capital campaign for his school. As we toured the school, around the corner came Jennifer with a group of 1st grade students. Denis, let me introduce you to Jenny Walsh one of our first grade teachers. "I think we met at the golf tournament" she said., this time her expression was not skeptical but warm. 

     A week later I entered a spaghetti dinner for another charity and bumped into Jenny at the table where you get your name tag. A week after that pulled into a parking lot, put the car into park, then Jenny pulled in next to me, put her car in park and we both got out of our cars at the same time. 

     Then I bumped into her at church. Six times in six weeks I bumped into her. By then, we were kind of friends, but it still took me nine months to ask her out. 

     Three months later she introduced me to her brother. "Actually Denis, I remember you from when we were kids. You went to Ward Parkway pool?" "Yep". "Actually, I remember one time when Jenny was on the high dive, and I was yelling at her to get down, she was too little. As she turned to climb down, she slipped and fell face first towards the concrete. As you put your hands on the ladder to go up you caught her. HMMM. That was 22 years ago. A cold awkward silence ensued. We did not speak for a couple of days. This shook me to my core. This was one more inexplicable coincidence that had no rational explanation. Now, today, since we have been married for 20 years, it makes total sense. 

     Rupert Sheldrake and his theory of morphic resonance helped me understand our interconnectedness. From a quantum level, the writings of Dean Radin helped me understand that there are connections that transcend time and space that we are just beginning to understand. The information about our connectedness seems to be available to all of us, the challenge is tuning our consciousness to perceive it.