Just suppose…….that there was no such thing as an accident…….that every event which happens to you is part of a learning process, a vast circle of human Awareness but tailored to the needs of each one of us.

Sticking with this image, the learning process would relate to our response to each “accident.” For example…….it is early, pre-school or workplace, the water in the kettle is about to boil and you reach for the jar of instant coffee. During the past few days, you forgot to replace it, but, hallelujah, there is just enough left for half a cup of this very necessary morning nectar. You pile it all onto the spoon, move to place this treasure in the waiting mug and, hey presto, the dark forces of the Devil jog your arm and the coffee covers the floor.

The description of your reaction is probably too terrible, too bloodless, too unspeakable to be spelled out on a blog which is available to be read by pretty much everyone who can understand English. I quickly draw the curtains on this particular scenario.

However, much later, what might have been the lesson to be learned from this “accident”? Could it have been that you are currently drinking too much coffee, digesting more caffeine than is adequate for your body’s daily requirements, and which indeed has now reached a point where both your kidneys and liver are complaining of titanic excess?

Or is the “accident” something completely different? Could it have been prompted by your brain, increasingly anxious that your failure to remember to buy more coffee on the previous three days is yet another manifestation of your fast fading memory?

Is there a desperate cry in this “accident” for a greater Awareness of a deeper malaise?

Or could it be your overflowing Hubris, increasingly intolerable for others to bear since your success at the Olympics, a salutary lesson from Zeus and his subordinates that you are fast approaching the limits of their endurance? Is this mere loss of coffee grounds in fact the last straw prior to Nemesis?

Meanwhile…….after my Family, then my Friends, my greatest treasure is my books. However, during the past few months, I’ve experienced an eerie Awareness that they seem to be positioning themselves in such a way that they are being read in the order that best serves their deeper understanding.

But I digress. These recent books, not all newly acquired but also mixed with those already on my shelves and previously read (though now, as I come to realise it, not fully understood) have taken over.

Over recent weeks, my suspicions of what has been occurring within what is publicly recognised as “my life” have grown stronger and stronger. Last Thursday they were confirmed by a very blatant “accident.”

I had asked my son with whom I was staying for a two-week vacation if he would try to get me a copy of a book I suspected was well out of print. Imagine my delight when he told me he’d been able to track down a copy.

It arrived from goodness-knows-where in mid-vacation…….except there’d been an “accident”

It wasn’t the right book.

But then, on the contrary, a quick glance at an opening paragraph or two revealed that it was very much the “right” book for my next reading. The other “right” book could wait.

And what did I learn from this “accident”?

To question that accidents actually happen.