The Tortellini Synchronicity

Only yesterday I had this thought: I’d like to eat some tortellini. I thought about going to the store to buy tortellini but got busy doing other things and didn’t think about it any more.

This morning, having forgotten about the tortellini, I decided I wanted a hamburger for lunch, so I drove to Walmart to purchase ground round and buns. I needed a few other items so I did some shopping. One of the items I needed was hand soap, and as I grabbed a bottle of soap off the store shelf, I saw bottles of cream-colored hand soap nearby, their labels announcing that brand of hand soap contained “milk and honey.” I can’t fathom why anyone would want to wash their hands with milk and honey. If I were to somehow get milk or honey (or both) on my hands, I would want to immediately wash my hands with old-fashioned soap and water – not with milk and honey.

Mystified at the thought of using milk and honey to clean one’s hands, I continued shopping. My wanderings amongst the aisles eventually brought me past the deli, and there I saw, hanging on the wall, row upon row of plastic bags filled with tortellini. Suddenly I remembered: I’d like to eat some tortellini. There were quite a few varieties: three cheese, mixed cheese, spinach cheese, herb chicken, and so on. I ended up buying tortellini stuffed with ricotta, parmesan, and romano, and tortelloni (shaped like tortellini but larger) stuffed with chicken and prosciutto.

I’d like to think that yesterday’s idle thought magically, and conveniently for me, made the bags of tortellini materialize in the store, but reality doesn’t work that way. Doubtless, the bags had always been there and it was yesterday’s idle thought that made me see them today. The tortellini had been forgotten by my conscious mind but not by my subconscious; my visual cortex had been “armed” by the thought “I’d like to eat some tortellini,” and suddenly what had been invisible now almost jumped off the wall at me. And it made me consider: how many things in the world are invisible to me – to each of us? How many things don’t exist in our reality until, perhaps, one day we become, or are made, ready to see them. Surely, the number must be very large.