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I'm not superstitious by nature but I long for some kind of oracle. Sometimes I look for meaning in what songs my iPhone's shuffle comes up with. Kind of an "iChing". (Apparently I'm not even the first Kirk to think like that. Plus here's a similar Tarot-centric approach.)

Similarly when I bike to work (not so much lately, with the poor weather) I would count it a good omen when I passed other bikers, but a poorer omen when they passed me, or rather I'd do a bit of arithmetic of passing vs being passed. (Some of the bad omen was mitigated if they were all up in biker gear, the tight black pants etc.) It's akin to the narrator looking for streaks of red cars in "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time". But of course, my mythology had a nice side-effect of encouraging me to bike faster so as to make more of my own luck.

I also have my "lucky numbers" that I count as good fortune to find... 222, which was the street of my highschool (and which led our renaming of its jazz band,) a number that shows up more often than you might think. And the final digits of the year of my birth, and graduations.

I don't know how seriously I buy into this homebrew attempts to tap into synchronicity. But like (Neils Bohr's? Lord Rutherford's?) horsehoe; maybe it works even if you don't believe in it.

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Illustration of the Moment

--Slate's historical look at children's books is kind of rambling, but Sendak not illustrating "The Hobbit" is a tragic missed opportunity.