According to conventional wisdom, cause comes before effect.   But not for me, evidently.

Yesterday on my way to the morning commute bus, I suddenly found myself humming a couple lines from a song I had almost forgotten.  It was probably written for children, pure comedy (at least as we saw it then, adults may have thought differently) about the Wild West not being the same anymore. The song was popular when I grew up, but I haven’t heard it much later, perhaps I don’t listen to kid radio.  (I should perhaps change that, as the kid radio station is my favorite in Sims 3…)  In any case, I haven’t heard the song in years, and this is important.

I noticed and was glad, because silly as it was, it was an improvement over the one that has been stuck in my brain all weekend.  (Unfortunately that earworm returned soon after and is still around unless I play something else every now and then.) Anyway, I got on the bus and soon started reading a magazine.  Near the end of the trip, about half an hour after I had brought up those couple lines from the childish song, I read the exact same lines quoted in an article about languages dying out.

It is the first time I have ever seen that song quoted in print, I am pretty sure.  And I haven’t thought about it for years.  Yet the exact same couple lines came to my mind half an hour before I read them.   If they had done so half an hour later instead, the causality would have been obvious. As it is, however…

This is not the first time, you know.  I wrote about the time I was walking along a country road and started thinking about how things would have turned out if the tricycle had become popular instead of the bicycle in our part of the world.  (It is, from what I see, a lot more common in Asia than here.)  As I was thinking about this, an adult tricycle came out from a side road. Because of the trees I had had no possibility to see the tricycle before I started thinking about it, and I had not seen it before nor have I seen it since.  I am not sure I have actually seen any adult trike before or after, they are not popular in Norway. In any case they have been exceedingly rare in my life.

Then there was the time when I heard for the first time a beautiful song (performed by Olav Stedje, I am pretty sure, but I have been unable to find it after the coming of Google these many years later).  It was about the arrival of his child and the deep feeling of connection he felt with it, as if the two of them had been together in the before-life and had become separated for a while due to his incarnation, but were now together again.  That morning just before I woke up, I had the only dream I know of in which I was a father and was looking forward to coming home to my children.  It is true that I often dream about strange things, but not this particular thing, and the timing was suspicious to say the least.

Then there was the time when I played a song on my cassette radio (I am old) and then switched to the radio, which was playing the same song.  Now that is what I call synchronicity, but not perfect synchronicity:  That was another time when I tried to change the volume of the song I was playing and found that I had not yet turned it on – the neighbor was playing it loudly just as I thought I had turned on my discman.

Anyway.  Effect precedes cause.  Not good for the fabric of spacetime, one would think.