car radio

Gordon Lightfoot: coincidence or miracle?

car radioWhen I was growing up, we didn’t have a television (no, I’m not THAT old—my parents just chose not to have one!) so we listened to the radio a lot. Some of my earliest memories are about being really terrorized by CBS Radio Mystery Theater.

I also remember hearing certain songs on the radio. Gordon Lightfoot’s “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” was one of them, and it seemed to spend an inordinate amount of time on the American Top 40 with Casey Kasem—yep, that was on the weekly audio buffet as well.

It’s not a song you’ll hear much any more, even if you haunt the halls of 70s radio on iTunes or Spotify, and it quickly slid out of my memory except for a brief cameo when we visited Sleeping Bear Dunes about 10 years ago and learned about famous shipwrecks of the Great Lakes.

Earlier this month, while on vacation in Scotland, I attended an Airbnb Experience called “Whisky tasting with music and history” by a singer/songwriter named Davy Holt in Inverness. It was a wonderful evening of delicious malt whisky, Scottish history told by a masterful storyteller, and traditional Scottish music, something I didn’t know too much about before.

After Inverness, we moved on to Glasgow, where with my BFF from our Los Angeles days, I visited a fellow health coach, Mary McConnell of Star Therapies, outside Glasgow for a brief retreat. (If you’re looking for a really magical retreat experience in that part of the world, do get in touch with Mary—as my kids would say, 10 out of 10 would recommend!) In her cozy dining room / art space I spied a CD case on the sideboard—Gordon Lightfoot—and had a small flashback to listening to that song again, then forgot it again.

Whisky, music, and historyAirbnb asks you to review your lodgings and your experiences, and while in Glasgow, I happily did so for Davy. I also sent him a direct message to thank him again, and we struck up a conversation in which he mentioned that one of his all-time favorite songs from our side of the world is … wait for it … yup, you got it, Gordon Lightfoot’s “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.”

This is unreal, I thought. How is it that I go so far away from home only to bump up against a piece of home not once but twice in about as many days?

And what does all this have to do with health coaching, which is what this blog is purportedly about?

Clients often tell me that during their initial YOURstory session, they suddenly make a connection between the state of their health and something they never considered related to it before—it’s like that sudden light-bulb-clicking-on moment: the connection was always there, they just hadn’t seen it before.

A miracle is a shift in perception.
~Marianne Williamson

Once they have that Aha! moment, they often go on to pick up on other connections between seemingly unrelated events and occurrences in their lives: it’s as though once the light is on, it doesn’t go off.

And what were logically, rationally seen as coincidences suddenly feel like miracles, messages from the Universe.

Too hokey or woo? Maybe.

A few years ago, I might have simply dismissed my Gordon Lightfoot sightings as a weird coincidence; now I wonder, what does it mean? (Please don’t tell me my ship’s about to go down!)

It’d be simple to jump to a conclusion using logic, although a rational mind would likely just dismiss it as exactly that—coincidence. And yet it feels more important, so I’m letting it simmer for now.

When I mentioned it to Davy, he said that in his experience, a coincidence like that usually happens to “bring the good people closer together.”

And maybe that’s the answer?

When we use our rational mind to see something as a coincidence, it’s the end of the conversation—it’s dismissed: “Well, that was weird, huh? Anyway, back to what we were talking about….”

When we use our deeper senses to recognize the same thing as a miracle, it’s the beginning of a conversation: Now that this has happened, what’s next? What can you create from it?

Shifting perspective from coincidence to miracle opens up boundless opportunities to move forward.

In terms of health, it can really shift someone from “My health is a problem, always has been, and always will be because XYZ happened to me” to “Now that I see the connections, I get why XYZ happened for me, and I can see a lot of paths to improving my health.”

Want to tune into some of the miracles in your health history? Schedule a free YOURstory session!

Tell me about YOUR Gordon Lightfoot moment in a comment!

Comments

  1. Marine Yanikian-Sutton

    Spot on! The only thing we control in life is our perception of any given moment. Why not use it for good? Why not sit with it and water it?

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