The Coincidences I Still Can’t Explain

The Weight of Black Light

The hotel lobby was a blur of midday heat, the sharp clinking of heavy cutlery from the nearby dining room and the low hum of conversation.

It was the early 1960s in India, and my father and I were walking out after a long lunch, relaxed and ready to head home.

When the lift doors opened, the carriage was already tightly packed, bodies pressed shoulder to shoulder in the way I remember lifts so often being then. A polite young man near the back squeezed himself against the wall and waved us forward.

“Come, sir, madam. We have place.”

My father nodded and stepped towards the open doors. Before his foot crossed the threshold, something happened that I have never been able to explain.

I looked into that crowded metal box and saw black.

Not darkness inside the lift. Not a shadow cast by the building. It seemed to surround the people themselves, a deep blackness where, until that moment, I had never consciously seen anything at all.

I was nineteen years old. I had never seen an aura before and didn’t even know whether that was what I was seeing. But whatever appeared before me came with something even stronger: an overwhelming feeling that we must not get into that lift.

I grabbed my father’s arm and pulled him backwards.

“Let’s wait,” I said.

Seconds later, the lift fell.

The people who had smiled and made room for us were gone. I was left standing beside my father, trying to understand why, moments earlier, something inside me, or perhaps something beyond me, had said no.

I didn’t have language for what had happened. In time, I would come to think of what I’d seen as an aura, and experiences of sensing people and places would become part of my life. But on that afternoon, I knew only one thing.

I had seen something I couldn’t explain, and I had listened to it.

The Shadow in the Corridor

For decades after that afternoon in the hotel lobby, my intuition became a companion I learned to trust. Life moved on. I married, became a mother, and watched my own children begin to navigate the world. Seeing auras and sensing the invisible temperature of a room became second nature to me.

But there was something I had yet to learn. Sensing that something was wrong did not necessarily mean I would have the power to change it.

That lesson came when my son was eighteen years old.

It was a weekend evening, and one of his close friends had been over at our house. They had been enjoying a few drinks, laughing and doing the things teenage boys do. As the night wound down, his friend began gathering his keys, insisting it was time for him to drive home.

“You shouldn’t be driving,” I told him. “Stay here tonight. I can call your mum right now and explain that you’re sleeping over so she won’t worry.”

But he refused. He was stubborn, gripped by that classic teenage fear of making his mother cross if he didn’t show up on time. My son backed me up and tried to talk him out of leaving, but the boy wouldn’t change his mind.

As he walked down the corridor towards our front door, that same inexplicable heaviness came over me. I didn’t see the blackness I had seen in India, but I felt something profoundly wrong. I wanted him to stay, and so did my son.

We tried once more to persuade him, but he was eighteen, worried about what his mother would say if he didn’t come home, and eventually he opened our front door and left.

He never made it home.

He was killed in a car accident that night.

For years, that night left me with a question very different from the one the lift had given me. If intuition had once allowed me to change what happened, why had it not allowed me to change this?

Perhaps sensing danger and having the power to prevent it are two entirely different things.

I still don’t know.

The $178,000 Cheque

By 1992, my life had shifted across the country. We had moved interstate from Perth to Canberra, the capital of Australia, and were embarking on a fresh chapter. For two years, we lived in a rental home while I worked tirelessly to establish my own business.

I was fiercely determined to stop renting. I wanted a permanent anchor for my family, and through sheer grit, I had managed to save a $17,000 deposit.

Finding a home within our budget, however, felt like chasing a mirage. I needed something affordable enough to fit within my strict financial limits, yet warm and welcoming enough to become a real family home.

Eventually, I found a property that felt right, but there was one enormous hurdle. The asking price was far higher than anything I could realistically afford.

Logically, it was out of the question.

One night, exhausted by the house hunting, I went to sleep with the problem still turning over in my mind and asked the universe for an undeniable sign. That night I had one of those dreams that doesn’t feel like an ordinary dream.

Two magnificent angels appeared before me. Slowly and deliberately, they unfurled a large white cheque. Printed across it in bold, unmistakable numbers was a very specific figure:

$178,000.

I woke with the number fixed in my mind.

In 1992, offering that amount for the house was well below the asking price. It seemed absurd, but I couldn’t shake that number. The next day, I called the real estate agent and placed my offer of exactly $178,000.

The agent didn’t just hesitate. She actually laughed out loud. She told me flatly that the figure was ridiculous and that the owners would never accept it.

“But,” she sighed, “legally, I am obligated to present all written offers to the sellers.”

I hung up the phone, bracing myself for the rejection. The worst they could do was say no.

Exactly fifteen minutes later, my phone rang.

The cynicism had disappeared from the agent’s voice. She sounded almost breathless.

“I don’t believe it,” she said. “You have a house.”

They had accepted my offer of exactly $178,000.

We moved into that home, and it became a place of stability for our family. But years later, after my business had grown, that same house took on another life. We renovated it, and it became the second beauty clinic in my expanding business. The house I had supposedly been foolish to offer $178,000 for became part of a future I could not possibly have seen when I made that phone call.

Was it coincidence? Perhaps.

But it was quite a coincidence.

The Things I Still Cannot Explain

I have lived long enough to know that memory can play tricks on us, coincidence happens, and human beings are remarkably good at finding patterns in places where perhaps none exist.

I know all of that, and yet I know that at nineteen I pulled my father away from a lift seconds before it fell.

I know what I felt as my son’s friend walked down our corridor on the last night of his life.

And I know that decades later I dreamed of two angels holding a cheque for $178,000, made an offer everyone thought ridiculous, and fifteen minutes later owned the house.

I cannot prove that any of those moments were divine intervention, intuition, synchronicity or something science might explain perfectly well, and perhaps I don’t need to. There are some experiences in life that become smaller when we try too hard to explain them.

Over the years, I have simply learned to notice, to listen when something deep inside me whispers, and to leave a little room in an otherwise practical life for the possibility that not everything we experience is ours to understand.

These are the coincidences I still can’t explain.

And after all these years, I’m rather glad I can’t.

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This post was previously published on ILLUMINATION.

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