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The Comfort of Coincidence



Making decisions is hard. And afterwards, you sometimes have an uneasy feeling you didn’t make the best decision. Other times you’re fairly confident you chose badly. And occasionally, you’re certain you completely blew it.

Then a coincidence occurs and you’re forced to reevaluate. Maybe it was…the right decision. I mean, who can argue with the fact, for example, you once believed the vintage bathroom fixtures in your old house were Fawn Beige and now in your new house, they actually are Fawn Beige.

Okay, the fixtures in my old house weren’t Fawn Beige. But for a minute, I thought they were. And the fixtures in the new house are. You can see it, right? We haven’t made a mistake! We haven’t foolishly been moving from house to house, searching for some elusive happiness over the rainbow. NO! They’re both Fawn Beige! (Or something that can be confused with it!)

Most importantly, all the fears I had about the house we just bought, the one that really has the Fawn Beige, all those fears have been swept away. Too dark? Too small? Too smooshed in by the neighboring houses? These are simply things that I’m meant to deal with. Can’t you see the universe telling me so?

You’re skeptical. But trust me. A good coincidence clears up all manner of uncertainty. And just like the placebo effect, it works even when you see behind the curtains. Like now. I can hear myself. This isn’t even all that great of a coincidence, but it’s helping me turn the corner on a house that, to be frank, I have not been friends with much since we bought it.

Also, to be clear, I didn’t know the newly purchased house had Fawn Beige. Nope. That was revealed when a dried on bar of soap pulled off some of the white epoxy paint covering it up. (So much to unpack here, but that’s for another day.)

There’s just the original Fawn Beige tub remaining. The replacement toilet is so shoddy that the seat cover only stays up when the tank lid is askew and the sink seems to have a special water-retaining mildew reservoir built in. But, hey, it’s still got the original 1960’s Fawn Beige tub! The big questions are, can I remove the lousy white paint and what condition is the tub in under the paint? And sure, I’ll have to search for both a Fawn Beige toilet and sink. But I’m okay with all of this, because I chose well. The cosmos told me so.

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