Lightning strikes twice! Trust me. 

 A long time asked question of any child is the simple “Why?” We have all heard this. We have all uttered it many times in many stages of our growth and development from a mere infant to the adult we are today. “Why ….. is the sky blue?  …… is the sun hot?….can’t I have another?......  do I have to stop?” or the classic that seems to enter our minds and perpetually surface at different times in our lives, “Why me?”

I sat in the room wondering (yet again), why me? Waiting for my father to arrive. Having been ‘part’ of the cause for yet another serious accident, resulting in another serious injury affecting a member of my family, again. The examination of any statistical information would never assist in answering this question truthfully. There are billions of people on earth and likely hundreds of thousands of daily accidents all around the world. Or are there? Isn’t it possible that due to certain approaches of concentration of certain circumstances those accidents may only be focused in one particular place, one particular group of people or, unfortunately, focused on one individual. You must have heard people say, “he’s/she’s so unlucky”.  Statistics will play with the odds and the figures, with such phrases as “the chances of running into a number 8 needle, sticking out of the ball of wool, left by your aunt on the arm of the chair….is one in 417,657,231”. But think about it! That means there is a chance someone will have that happen. A ‘chance’ that someone will be the one. Ashley Brilliant had a saying I saw some years ago, “it’s a million to one chance, that I’m the one in a million” That is the point. Someone has to be.

Perversely that also does not prevent the odds for similar or completely different incidents happening to the same person. Statistics will simply spread the myth that because lots of people engage in using needles, then an accident such as that happening will only happen there once. Wrong! There are people who have been struck by lightning more than once. And most of us grew up believing that “lightning doesn’t strike twice in the same place”. Another grossly incorrect phrase. They may not have been standing in the exact same place (more on that in a later blog), or even the same vicinity, but they have been struck. Twice or more. People say, “How unlucky” and “What are the chances?’ forget it. Those people are choosing to believe the myth spread by statistics. It does, and can happen, more than once, to the same person. Just because there are people all over the world it doesn’t mean the focus of any incident will be. I know. Here I sit waiting to explain why it has happened here, to me, again.

(continued tomorrow)