Puzzling

 I have been left scratching my head the last couple of days. While part of the puzzle is solved, for the life of me, I can’t work out the other.

I had decided to do some work on myself and had gone down to the treatment room, as that provides a quiet, peaceful atmosphere, perfect for what I was about to do.

I had only just got off the phone to a friend and promised to do a reading for her. These are channelled, written words and I decided to carry out this one down there. I was half-way through when my daughter-in-law, Genevieve, messaged me. I glanced at this, replied, then carried on with the reading, leaving the phone alongside me. Another message came through from Genevieve and when I went to reply, there in my message area was a sequenced number 978-0473-61770-7. How did that get there? And what was this number. It was in my section, the one that is usually blank, that I write in then send. I could have brushed it off as somehow absent-mindedly having my hand on the phone’s keypad as I was doing the reading and punching the numbers in at the same time but I wouldn’t have been able to add the dashes if this was the case.

Then I wondered, could this have been an old message, sitting there from long ago and not sent? But I had just replied to Genevieve, and this was a brand-new message, so that couldn’t have been possible either. I wondered if I had just pasted something and somehow repasted that number, but the last pasting I did was transferring photos and the code had completely different digits.

Between us, Genevieve and I tried to figure out what the number might be. Was it a phone number or an ISBN? I checked Ty’s Roller Coaster Ride, but it wasn’t that number, although the first few digits were similar. I looked up phone numbers. It was close to the Massachusetts’ area code or Nepal which started 976.

Yesterday, I found an international data base for ISBNs. This number was not on their register. As a last resort, I decided to check my other books, and there on the back cover of The Collective Us I found the match. The number was the ISBN for my second book.

Okay, that solves half the puzzle, but how did a number, which I haven’t used for more than 18 months, appear in my Messenger, unsent message space? That has me baffled. What part of the phone was that stored in and how did it transport itself there and then? I cannot find a logical explanation.

Another query is why my book’s ISBN did not appear on the international data base. But that is another issue.

Amidst all this confusion, and before I found it was my own ISBN number, I had added all the digits together. They came to 66. I wondered if there was a message for one of us in that number.  I Googled 66 and found it symbolised the power of unconditional love and harmony in overcoming challenges and adversities. A nice message. Failing any other explanation, I will take this as an intended message after all. It is a good reminder. Love is the most powerful force in this universe and using it, will solve any problem far more rapidly than violence.