A few weeks ago, I wrote a post about spirit/totem animals where I started with a story about visiting a colleague whose husband died last summer and how her story of his totem animal stuck with me for weeks, prompting my own reflections on what animal aligns with my personality and representing something I have believed in for years: synchronicity. I first learned of the idea when I read a book I referenced in another entry: Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity. Obviously, synchronicity, as discussed by Carl Jung, is a complex concept. I do not mean to disrespect that complexity in a brief blog entry like this one; instead, I intend to show my respect for it by raising it as a topic worth exploring, starting with what it means to me.
Since being introduced to synchronicity well over a decade ago, I have thought of it as a way of discerning meaning from the seemingly random things that happen in our daily lives. Some people have distilled this thought–or oversimplified it according to some–by saying that things happen for a reason. We just need to figure out that reason. I had heard of totem animals for years, but last summer’s reintroduction came at a time when I was trying to figure out a few things, what steps I wanted to take in regard to particular parts of my life. The reading I did on the topic and what I uncovered taught me a few things that helped me decide on a few of those steps. I recognize that the lack of detail (since it’s so personal and, frankly, irrelevant to the point of this post) may be confusing, but I am basically saying that this topic came along at the right time for me.
This is not the first time I have experienced synchronicity. In 2006, I won a fellowship to take part in a summer program where I was supposed to gain access to particular archives. However, when I arrived, I found out that the archives I needed were going to be closed for the entire month of my stay for renovation. At first, I was very confused. I was living in a city away from my husband for a month to work on my research, but a key part of that project was not available to me after all. Then, the next day, I was checking my email, and one of the listservs to which I belong had a CFP seeking essays for a collection about a play I had taught the previous semester. An essay on that play had absolutely nothing to do with the research I had planned for the summer program, but I needed a project. I wrote the essay, planning to submit it to a journal if the collection’s editors did not want it for the book. But they did want it, and it appeared in print a couple of years later. I would have ignored it in just about any other context, but I needed a project, and it appeared right before me.
When I talk about this topic, a lot of people roll their eyes or smile politely, often believing that coincidence is just coincidence. Others, though, have immediately started describing synchronous examples of their own. How about you? Have you experienced synchronicity in your professional or personal life? Do a few examples come to mind even if you have never thought about it before? Let us know in the comments. And keep your ears, eyes, and mind open to synchronicity that might be happening right in front of you!
[Creative Commons licensed image by Flickr user nhighberg]
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45 Responses to Synchronicity All Around You
jaslawlib - December 16, 2010 at 1:26 pm
I have a strange sort of loathing for the phrases, “It was meant to be,” and “things happen for a reason,” since it seems to outline a sort of fatalistic passivity. However, I certainly believe that certain actions you take or expressions of intention you make (even if you are not consciously aware of them) can set up conditions that make opportunities possible and certain events (such as the one you outline) which initially seem like obstacles can be recreated as opportunities.
My road to academia was paved by both of those two types of events. First, I had been laid off from a corporate job (seeming obstacle), which I decided was finally the impetus to go to library school (opportunity). I expressed my firm intention to “just figure it out” to my husband, but I was outside the application window for my state’s public university program. A few days later, my husband e-mailed me news about a new extension program for the MLS degree at a location even more convenient to me than main campus. I followed it up and found out that the application deadline had been waived for the extension program. I applied and was accepted.
The way the dominoes fell, it might look like the situation was “meant to happen,” but had I not expressed my intention to my husband, it might not have occurred to him to send me the information that led me to securing my degree in such a timely manner.
aeryn74 - December 16, 2010 at 3:57 pm
“That is how innovation happens; chance favors the connected mind”
–Steven Johnson
velvis - December 16, 2010 at 4:18 pm
I believe so much in the “it was meant to be” that it really seems like I’m a little too well protected.
Interviewed for a teaching job on my grandfather’s bday (he was the only one who wanted to me to teach) It was in the middle of July, two days later I got the job and started a week after that.
I don’t take a passive stance in my fate – but I know that if I’m experiencing something that will suck the world out from underneath my feet it’s because I’m supposed to be an astronaut.
This isn’t a religious thing perhaps spiritual or perhaps I’m like the high dessert Native Americans who when they need rain dance until it rains. Yet it could be mathematical even – statistically I land on my feet more often than fall on my butt.
11310548 - December 16, 2010 at 4:49 pm
I experience synchronicity all the time. A lot of it is in little things — I think of someone, call them, and they will say “I was just thinking of you.” Sometime it comes in bigger ways, for example as part of a class I wrote what was my “ideal job”. I had never articulated it before. A few months later I got a letter asking me to apply for it — the position had just been created. I think that if you are open to the universe, good things will come.
dboyles - December 16, 2010 at 4:51 pm
In any retrospective view how can contingent events appear not to have been connected? Doesn’t this desire for connectedness by an after-the-fact explanation lead us to construct a coherent narrative in which unrelated, aleatory, diachronic events successfully find themselves part of a linearly-lived “destiny”? Language itself teaches us this: until the trajectory of a sentence is over and the period affixed, it remains open-ended and may go any of several directions. Cliches such as “A career is what forms behind oneself” similarly attempt to capture the concept that our lives are formed but in the wake of some being on the brink of a frontier, as a jet trail is formed in the wake of a moving pinpoint in the sky. Until we “arrive” it is as easy to look back in time and explain where we have been as it is difficult sometimes to know–hopefully unlike a jet–where we are going. We sometimes say “Life doesn’t come with a blueprint.” Synchronicity implies a causal relation between aleatory events. But isn’t this Jungian explanation/rationalization for causal relationships between disconnected events but a rabbit we put in the hat to explain how it is we could remove it, “Presto!” providing thereby some kind of “rational” and for-all- that, mythical explanation?
I have heard in some cultures that man faces time like it was a river rushing toward him, while in other cultures he tends to view the river receding from where he views it. A false dichotomy no doubt. No matter where we stand we only postulate a linear projection into the future as well as a linear narrative back through time. Comforting illusion.
philosophy - December 16, 2010 at 5:31 pm
Isn’t synchronicity just the highfalutin, academic term for serendipity? Or maybe merely for accidental?
drnels - December 16, 2010 at 5:52 pm
@velvis, yes, this is definitely spiritual to me. I didn’t want to bring that into the discussion in such a short blog post, but it is very much a part of my spiritual belief system.
@dboyles, yes, I think that we often do look back and find a coherent narrative. One thing I did not make as clear in this entry is how I have used this idea to look ahead. @jaslawlib, this is why it does not feel passive to me. What’s been going on around me lately that I need to be paying attention to? That kind of thing. And reading Alice Walker taught me think of that river as ever-changing. You never step in the same river twice no matter where you are when you enter it. I love that concept, too.
@philosophy, it might be. I was just introduced to it as synchronicity and have never really thought about serendipity, so that’s why my perspective is how it is.
@11310548, I certainly agree. And, @aeryn74, perfect quotation!
dferrell - December 16, 2010 at 5:54 pm
Throughout my life, “things” have happened that seemed to be so well timed, that synchronicity has to be the answer. When we were first married (my husband was a post-doc) and I was working at a minimum wage job waiting to get residency so I could finish my BS. We were living a sparse life–my dad called and said he had figured out how much money we could have gotten back from taxes if he hadn’t claimed me as a dependent. A much needed check followed. When my husband was diagnosed with Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma and we had a 14 month old daughter, I thought our life was over. He is still living and working 30+ years later, But he was offered a position in another state and at a university that had a doctoral program for me. I had been told his survival was less than 50-50 and he probably wouldn’t live to see her go to Kindergarten. We moved and after each milestone in her life – the end of Kindergarten, graduation from 8th grade, high school, college, and her masters degree- we sit at the kitchen table and talk about how wonderful it is and how different it could have been. I completed the Ph.D. program and have a wonderful position at another university. Other things have happened – each time he came out of remission, there was a new treatment. He has been in and out of remission and had 2 stem cell transplants but here we are getting ready for our daughter’s wedding.
bookdoctor - December 17, 2010 at 9:11 am
Personally I am not sure synchronicity occurs in some ‘meant to be’ fatalistic way. The quote by aeryn74 above seems more accurate – ‘chance favors the prepared mind.’ Our as one of my wise elders used to say, “taking advantage of the opportunities we encounter on daily basis is entirely up to our choice and our state of mind. Anything can become a life-changing opportunity if viewed from the right perspective and accompanied by a series of ‘correct’ decisions.”
angegome - December 17, 2010 at 9:19 am
I have experience synchronicity in many different ways. Few years ago, I was feeling lonely, my family lives so far away from where I live, and I though that it was so difficult for me to take care of my two kids and to deal with my husband’s awful work schedule.
Then I met a mom, she has also two kids who are the same age as mine and she has a terminal illness, she can not walk and she is loosing her capacity to do many things, but she was fine, she was smiling and enjoying the time she passes with her kids and her husband, who is a doctor like mine.
Did I have the right to feel sorry for myself?
catlkelley - December 17, 2010 at 9:19 am
It may be quite true that things happen because of coincidence, rather than that they were “meant to be.” However, an event with a rational explanation can still be profound. These things happen to me all the time. I sprained my ankle while hurrying to a meeting last week. Today, I happened to notice a fortune from a fortune cookie that i had found important enough to save … “he who hurries cannot walk with dignity.” I got this fortune less than a week before my accident. I do not think that this fortune was propjhetic! But the fact that I had saved it (I almost never do) shows that hurrying too much was on my mind. I ignored this reminder to myself, and injured myself while hurrying … So now I can’t hurry, for a while.
I don’t see any great message from the universe here, but I can still put the pieces together and learn.
lizziec - December 17, 2010 at 9:35 am
Physician/author/metaphysicial teacher Deepak Chopra writes about Synchrodestiny in one of his books (Spontaneous Fulfillment of Desire). For those of you curious and open to different ways of looking at the world – I recommend the book. For those of you convinced that all there is to know is already documented – end of story, move on to the next article.
I found the book most thought-provoking and worth the time to read and ponder.
Enjoy!
soptc - December 17, 2010 at 9:56 am
Synchronicity? Serendipity? How about entropy?
dank48 - December 17, 2010 at 10:02 am
In AA, one hears it said–by nonbelievers as well as believers–that coincidence is God’s way of preserving His anonymity.
And, in fact, you never step into the same river once.
hngjohnson - December 17, 2010 at 11:08 am
I think dboyles’ language metaphor above is helpful. The trajectory of a sentence in a communicative act is formed in the space between speakers. (Bakhtin would be a good reference for this idea.) It doesn’t “belong” to either speaker, but it enters into our linear experience in the way (or in the spirit) with which they act jointly. Although you can’t nail it down and say, “look, here it is”; there is a sense that synchronicity is less random than it is a product of joint actions in the unseen space between us that are created in the spirit by which we act together.
jpetit - December 17, 2010 at 2:23 pm
This can also be the Baader Meinhoff Phenomenon (not the film).
This nice little article talks about how our brains seek out patterns and attempt to find meaning.
“Our brains are fantastic pattern recognition engines, a characteristic which is highly useful for learning, but it does cause the brain to lend excessive importance to unremarkable events. Considering how many words, names, and ideas a person is exposed to in any given day, it is unsurprising that we sometimes encounter the same information again within a short time. When that occasional intersection occurs, the brain promotes the information because the two instances make up the beginnings of a sequence. What we fail to notice is the hundreds or thousands of pieces of information which aren’t repeated, because they do not conform to an interesting pattern. This tendency to ignore the “uninteresting” data is an example of selective attention.
In point of fact, coincidences themselves are usually just an artifact of perception. We humans tend to underestimate the probability of coinciding events, so our expectations are at odds with reality. And non-coincidental events do not grab our attention with anywhere near the same intensity, because coincidences are patterns, and the brain actually stimulates us for successfully detecting patterns… hence their inflated value. In short, patterns are habit-forming.”