acorn /ˈāˌkôrn/

Jamie, a former associate, once proclaimed in serious fashion that he did not believe squirrels pooped. His reasoning was straight forward: He’d never spied one pooping.

While I approved of his methodology, I preferred to interpret that squirrel poop remained unproven in my own experience yet an extremely likely reality based on logic and reasoning and scientific testimony.

It was some years later when he finally recanted. “Squirrels poop,” he said. It seems one had found his way into Jamie’s house and pooped on his desk. Right where he couldn’t miss it. Mystery solved.

Some would call that a coincidence. Some might call it an act of cosmic significance. To me these are flimsy labels. Causality cannot be trumped. The pervasive interconnections of all things in reality are the building blocks of all events and provide infinite opportunity for anyone with an imagination to connect dots in all manners of short-cuts, creating the illusions of coincidence, signs, karma, intelligent design. These little tricks might help to navigate patterns of causality but they are never the root of causation.

The proof is in what happens before my eyes at every waking moment every day. If causality were not omnipotent, then it would at times have to fail and be witnessed failing. Has anyone ever dropped a dime and it fell, not to the floor but up into the clouds? I doubt it.

“I believe everything happens for a reason!” said a friend of mine who drinks too much.

“For one reason?” I asked, “or for a combination of reasons numbering near infinity for all intents and purposes?”

“A reason!”

It’s interesting how many people escape high school with diplomas who did not learn the single most basic principle of reality. Makes you wonder who’s managing the curriculum.

If you wish to further explore Jamie’s ideas, he is a writer, most recently of the script for film Unearthing (2015) starring Tim Rozon. I haven’t seen the film yet. I assume it’s about the unearthing of squirrel poop or evidence thereof.