Synchro Journeys

In The Synchronicity Highway, Chapter 1, The Synchro Travelers, begins this way:

When you venture forth on a journey, a trek that takes you out of your normal routines and concerns, your consciousness has greater freedom to explore. Your comfort ones are gone, your kitchen, your bed and your pillows are memories. You’re in new, unfamiliar territory and must confront who you are.

That condition is especially true during lengthy trips, when travel turns into journey. Not being anchored in your usual world can stimulate stress, but also synchronicity. Here’s a story that perfectly fits what we were talking about in the that chapter. It’s from Steve Finegan, who has a blog called ‘Achieving Wow!’

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“When I was 19, I spent the summer trekking through Europe with my girlfriend. It was great, for a while. But throw two kids together for a few months, traveling on filthy buses and trains, frequently sleeping out in the open, often in the rain, and never-ever getting enough to eat, and you build up a certain amount of tension. Anyway, this tension mounted, until one day, riding a bus through Munich, we just stopped speaking to each other.

“Eventually, we got off and started walking. Twenty minutes and many twists and turns later, I heard my girlfriend groan. I turned. She was sitting on the curb, her head between her knees, sobbing. She’d left her little blue travel case on the bus and had been too tired to miss it. That was it. The last straw. We had it out right there and wound up breaking up.

“Determined at least to make an attempt to find her case before going our separate ways, we found a police station and went in, planning to report it lost, even though we knew the odds of getting it back were zero. But inside the station, we found a woman beside herself with excitement. She waved us outside. A bus had pulled up. We made a dash for it. The doors hissed opened, and there was my girlfriend’s case, sitting beside the driver.

“He smiled and pointed at it. “You lucky, ja!” In the rush of relief, the tension broke, and my girlfriend and I made up on the spot. Our relationship wasn’t to last, but we finished our travels through Europe together without having another argument. The experience had changed us.”

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 Just reading Steve’s story reminded me of past journeys to foreign lands where new and unexpected experiences – some good, some not-so-good – occurred on a daily basis. A big part of those trips were the friendships made, short-lived, but intense – one following another. And as a lone traveler, spells of loneliness. Some of those stories are included in that chapter of the book.