I am an avid believer that there is no greater purpose to everything other than what we and others create out of it. Everything is a learning experience – if you allow it to be. Everything is connected – due to a sort of passive “Dao/Tao-The Holy Ghost-and-Evolutionary principles” sort of natural order: Not because we are ruled by fate.

Coincidences are just that. Statistically likely co-occurring events. But then there are just those time intervals whose correlating incidences make you stop and wonder if perhaps the easiest explanation to the universe is simply that God is a practical joker without anything better to do than laugh at us. After all, what other entertainment can be offered to something omnipotent?

As with all things, these jokes too come in three.

Last week, three such not quite correlated but codependent jokes of sorts came to me. The first, good and comfortable. The second, very good but also very complicated. The third, confusing and very bad.

Like an interconnected knot to which if one pulls on one of the threads, the others are shortened, reduced, diminished or further entwined. Ultimately, leaving fate as the contorted results of whatever thread is pulled the hardest.

When the third thread is unavoidably pulled by someone other than me – as is the nature of thread three, two things can happen. The knot tightens and either thread one becomes dramatically shorter or somewhat longer. Thread two will completely separate from the knot and exist in alternative isolation.

If I instead choose to pull thread two myself, thread one and three disappear completely. Untangled, fantastical and completely unsupported.

If I instead choose to let thread one keep its current pull, then thread two keeps shortening until it disappears completely. The knot unravels to reveal that thread one is just the other end of thread three. Ultimately, thread one becomes subject as to whether the pulling of thread three comes at the expense of thread one or if the pulling stretches it, enlongating thread one.

The rather bizarre timing of it all makes it hard to take any of life seriously.