It's a Wonderful, Spooky Life

It’s a wonderful life, and good-spooky, sometimes.

If you’ve been reading my blog recently at TomVMorris.com, you know I’m super excited about the publication of the new books, The Oasis Within and The Golden Palace. Almost every day, I get some nice affirmation that I’ve spent the past five years well, in writing the big series on Egypt that these books together launch. If you're a regular reader, you’ll also know that all this came to me as an inner vision, a movie playing in my head—something that I had never experienced before. An older physician friend asked me the other day, “Did it ever feel scary?” 

I had to smile. I said, “No. It was sort of spooky in its radical difference from anything I'd ever experienced before, but it all came to me with a tonality of goodness and benevolence, and a sense of joy.” Sometimes I think that life has more strange and cool stuff waiting for us than we ever might imagine.

Today, a shiny new black sedan was waiting for me outside my hotel in Philadelphia. I had just spoken to a group of CEOs and CFOs in The Lincoln Financial Field, where the Eagles play football. The driver took my bags and I slid into the comfortable backseat. I asked him how his morning had been so far. And his accent was interesting, sounding a little like some friends who are from northern India. So I said, “Is your accent Indian?”

He said, “No. Egyptian.” I instantly had one of those little spooky moments where you sort of can’t believe what you just heard. 

I said, “I’ve spent the past five years of my life writing a series of novels about Egypt, set in 1934 and 1935.”

He said, “My father was born in 1932.” Ok then. I had hit the jackpot here. So I told him the whole story, the movie in my head, and the feeling that I shouldn’t do any research on Egypt but just write what came to me. But I explained that I had also Googled stuff after writing it, just to see if there was any connection between my mental movie and reality, and that I was amazed at how much stuff had checked out to be true, even though I knew that my stories were about a re-imagined Egypt. I then told him that my main character is a boy named Walid.

He said, “That’s my name.”

“What?” 

“My name is Walid.”

I said, “That’s amazing.” The man pulled out his wallet and handed me his beautiful business card. Walid Omar. I was curious. “Could you pronounce your name really clearly for me?”

“WaLEED,” he said.

“Wow. That’s great. That’s exactly the way the people in my mental movie say the name. And my wife has been dubious. She’s thought I’m surely mispronouncing it, because a lady I know from Morocco had said it differently, as ‘WA-Lid.”

“No. It’s WaLEED. It’s spelled W-a-l-i-d but pronounced WaLEED.”

“Thank you so much for confirming what I heard in my movie.”

“You’re welcome.”

We continued to talk. He’s from Alexandria. And one of the books to be published will feature some events in that ancient city. I almost never carry my own books with me, but on this trip, I had a copy of The Oasis Within inside my computer bag. I was planning to re-read it on the flight home. But at that moment, I was overcome with a very strong conviction that I was supposed to give it to my driver, Walid. So I did. A book about Walid for my new friend Walid.

It’s a wonderful, spooky world in which we live, and a wonderfully spooky life we can have when we open up and step out and talk to people about things that mean something to us—and then listen.

May your day and week and upcoming month be wonderfully spooky, as well.

Deeply Connected

We're all deeply connected. So, how did we get so far apart?

The news is always full of anger, hatred, murder, and theft, not to mention war and threats of war, and to read it every day, you'd come to think that the most common mindset in the world is the adversarial stand: Me against you, us against them, ours versus theirs. And yet, as all the deepest thinkers across the most profound sciences and religions tell us, we're all connected at the most fundamental level imaginable. We blossom from the same roots. We've bubbled up from the same soup. We're also touched by a common spirit, and inhabit a common home. We need to appreciate these deep connections more. We need to put aside false division and live our unity.

I came across an odd little story recently. And it stuck in my head. We have a lot of great writers where I live, in Wilmington, NC, both novelists and nonfiction types. And among our local magazines is a great monthly celebrating the arts and culture, called Salt. In the most recent issue, the great novelist Wiley Cash (A Land More Kind Than Home, This Dark Road to Mercy) tells some stories about southern writers on book tour. This one tweaked my attention. Wiley writes:

When my friend Tom Franklin left Mississippi on book tour, he told his wife that he was taking along his copy of Cold Mountain just in case he ran into Charles Frazier on his stop in North Carolina. "You're crazy," his wife said. "North Carolina's too big. What are the odds?" Halfway through his tour, Tom realized he needed a new pair of blue jeans, so when he arrived in Raleigh for his book signing at Quail Ridge Books, he headed first to the Crabtree Valley Mall, where he ran into Charles Frazier. "I saw him in J.C. Penney," he said. "I told him I had a copy of Cold Mountain out in my car, and he said he'd be happy to sign it."

Ok. How strange is that? Think about it for a second. In a state with millions of people, scattered through hundreds, and maybe even thousands of cities and towns and hamlets, all moving around here and there, or sometimes, if they're writers, staying inside their own homes while writing all day, what's the probability that this one guy visiting a few cities in North Carolina for a book tour will personally see a particular famous author he admires, and has prepared to see by bringing along a book to be signed, in a J.C. Penney - not in a bookstore, or library, or public radio station lobby, or Apple Store, where writers sometimes go to get their Macs fixed? And yes, of course, I know that coincidences, minor and major, happen all the time. But really. My life has been chock full of such things, and it's almost like I've been destined to hear other people's stories of the like, so that I'll think hard about what these marvels may indicate, or mean, far beyond just the real but still odd fact that even the immensely improbable is probably going to happen now and then.

I've come to suspect that our deep connections, at the most fundamental level, give rise to a form of potential informational access, and knowledge, for which we don't have either clear categories, or any solid understanding. And yet, our understanding has never been a requirement for reality. Throughout human history, we've failed for long stretches of time to understand many things that were nonetheless real. Sometimes our understanding catches up with the experienced realities that have formerly eluded us, and sometimes the mysteries continue. But their actuality does not depend on our conceptual grasp.

Are there then connections and ways of knowing that we could, in principle, be using to enhance our lives and positive impacts on the world around us? A psychologist friend once told me that he thinks the single most important quality for human beings to have is open-ness. Are we open enough to the strange and potentially fruitful interconnections that we may enjoy with others?

In a world of obvious and noisy divisiveness, perhaps we should think about such things more. Pay attention. Listen. And when you feel a nudge that maybe doesn't make sense, on the surface, and that might even elicit an "Are you crazy?" response if you mention it to someone else, maybe you should show it some respect, and act on it. You just never know. Or maybe you do.