The problem with being spiritual is that, after a while, you start noticing things.

Not everything. I don’t walk around assuming every delayed train or weird text message is the universe trying to tell me something. But I’ve had enough experiences in my life that felt too perfectly timed, too improbable, too strangely connected to dismiss all of them as coincidence.

And most of the time, that’s kind of nice.

On Friday, my dad had a scheduled surgery. The night before, my parents decided to go to the temple. Pretty normal thing to do before something like that. Go pray, ask for protection, calm your nerves a little bit.

Except the temple was closed.

So they went to another temple. That one was closed too.

When they came home and told me, I remember immediately thinking, Hmm. I don’t love that.

Actually, the thought was less polite than that and more like:

WTF, that’s not a good sign.

I didn’t say anything. Partly because there was obviously no point in making everyone more nervous, but also because some irrational part of me didn’t even want to say the thought out loud. As though saying it would somehow give it more weight. Which, when I think about it now, is its own strange little spiritual belief.

One temple being closed, whatever. Two temples being closed the night before your dad’s surgery somehow feels different. Logically, I know that makes very little sense. There was a perfectly normal reason the temples were closed. But spirituality doesn’t always operate in the same part of the brain as logic.

And that’s where I got stuck.

Because if I’m willing to look at some coincidence in my life and think, Okay, maybe that meant something, I can’t suddenly become a convenient skeptic the second the coincidence makes me uncomfortable.

At some point later that night, I basically decided to trick my own brain. What if I was reading it completely wrong?

Maybe the message wasn’t, You came looking for God and the doors were closed.

Maybe it was, Why are you here? Go home. You don’t need to worry about this. I’ve got it.

And weirdly, that helped.

But then it created a completely different problem.

The scary interpretation came to me immediately. The comforting one required some work.

So was I actually seeing the same event differently, or was I just inventing a nicer story because I was a little nervous?

I don’t know.

My dad’s surgery went well. Everything was fine (and all is good, he's recovering well). And of course, afterward, it becomes tempting to look back and say, See? Maybe the second interpretation was right.

But I don’t really trust that either, because now I know the ending.

What I keep thinking about instead is how easily the exact same event became two completely different stories in my head. Neither temple changed. Nothing about the night changed. I changed the meaning.

Maybe that’s the strange part of being spiritual. You become open to the possibility that things might mean something, and then you have to confront the much harder question of whether you actually know what they mean.

I still don’t know what those two closed temples meant. Maybe they meant nothing at all. What I do know is that, within a few hours, I managed to turn the exact same event into both a warning and a reassurance.

The next time something feels like a sign, remember: what happened and what it means are two different things.

I Pebble You,
Ankit

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