Nothing Is Coincidental
Three days ago I found out someone else built my app.
Same name. Same concept. I’d been chipping away at it quietly for six, seven months — the kind of slow, private building you don’t tell people about because it still feels too fragile to survive being said out loud. And then there it was. Already live. Already someone else’s.
I was devastated. Not dramatic-devastated. Just hollowed out, the way you get when something you were protecting turns out to have already left the building.
The next day, a video showed up on my feed. David Bayer, talking about visualization — and not the way I’d always understood it.
Not something you force. Something you receive.
He said the way most of us are taught to visualize — sit down, put on a frequency track, broadcast what you want at the universe like you’re trying to win an argument with it — is actually a form of resistance. A negotiation. He said the future doesn’t need to be manufactured. It’s already there, as potential, waiting for you to get quiet enough to perceive it.
I sat with that for a second. And then it connected to something else — a book I read a while back, Big Magic, by Elizabeth Gilbert. The part that stuck with me wasn’t the magic. It was the warning. That ideas are alive. That they move through the world looking for someone ready to take them. And if you don’t act — if you let it sit too long, if you keep almost-starting — it doesn’t wait. It moves on to someone who will.
I read that years ago and thought it was a nice way to talk about creativity. I didn’t think it was talking about me.
Here’s the part I haven’t said yet, even to myself, really.
This isn’t the first time. It’s not even the fifth time. I get an idea — a business, a product, sometimes just a blog post — and I sit on it. Not because I decide to. I just… don’t move. And then weeks or months later, I see it. Someone else’s version of the thing I was circling. Out in the world, doing fine without me.
I used to think that was bad luck. A coincidence that kept finding me.
Coming back to David Bayer’s video, he mentioned how we need to be quiet to receive the ideas. I don’t fill my days with quiet. I fill them with noise — my phone, music, a podcast, a true crime video, anything, the second a moment opens up. Bayer talked about this too. He said trauma and stress and old beliefs create static, like a leaf blower running next to a radio, and you can’t hear what’s trying to come through until the noise stops. And I thought about how hard I work to make sure the noise never stops. How allergic I am to the version of stillness that isn’t scrolling, isn’t half-listening to a stranger’s true crime story, or a paranormal scary stories, isn’t anything except actually sitting there with myself.
I end most days tired. Not the good kind of tired. The kind where I’ve technically done things all day and still feel like nothing happened. Like my own life is something I’m half-watching instead of living.
And somewhere in there — under the noise, I think — there are ideas. I know there are, because I keep half-catching them. I just never finish hearing them out.
I don’t have a tidy ending for this one.
I’d like to tell you that finding out about the app was the wake-up call, that I’ve started meditating every morning since, that the noise has gone quiet and the ideas are finally landing somewhere I can catch them.
That’s not true yet.
What’s true is that I noticed the pattern, finally, after years of living inside it without naming it.
Nothing is coincidental — that’s the sentence that arrived, uninvited, the day after the video. I don’t fully know what to do with it yet.
I keep coming back to the question of what I’d hear if I actually let myself be quiet. Not for an hour. Not as a practice with a candle and a journal and a plan. Just — quiet. Empty. On purpose. Long enough to find out if something’s been trying to reach me this whole time, underneath the podcast and the scroll and the noise I keep mistaking for being alive.
I haven’t done it yet. I’m telling you that honestly, because I think you might recognize the avoiding more than you’d recognize the stillness. If that’s you too — what are you reaching for instead of the quiet? And what might already be trying to find you, if you let it?
