Back in the mid-1980s, Trish and I used to lead adventure tours for freelance writers to South America. The trips were sponsored by Avianca Airlines, a Colombian hotel chain, and others. We made multiple trips to the Upper Amazon cruising between Leticia, Colombia and Iquitos, Peru, and also led trips to Cartagena, Bogota, Santa Marta, the Lost City of the Sierra Nevada Mountains of Santa Marta, and the Colombian Andes, a region known as Boyaca. We also made a couple of trips to two lesser known Caribbean islands—San Andres and Providencia—that featured scuba diving in a blue hole and lobster dinners.
On one of the latter trips, a freelance writer from Kansas City joined us and she eventually sold a couple of travel articles. Her name is Pam Grout and now she’s a very successful author of self-help books. They include, among others: E-Squared: Nine-Do-it-Yourself Energy Experiments That Prove Your Thoughts Create Your Reality; E-Cubed: Nine More Energy Experiments That Prove Manifesting Magic and Miracles is You Full-Time Gig; and most recently, THANK & GROW RICH: A 30-day Experiment in Shameless Gratitude and Unabashed Joy.
After E-Squared became a best-seller, I e-mailed Pam to congratulate her. I had not been in touch with her since she sent me the articles she published on San Andres and Providencia, but she recalled the trip fondly. She also remembered there were two Robs in the group, one was the organizer (me) and the other one was quite interested in her. In fact, they stayed in touch for some time afterwards. Pam wanted to know which one I was and, alas, maybe she was a bit disappointed to find out I was the organizer and not the long-ago love interest. Whatever, she told me she was e-mailing me from Istanbul, Turkey, where she was off on another journey, and that was that.
Pam writes with a good deal of wit, and her self-help tomes are definitely good reads. I picked up Thank & Grow Rich the other day and happened to open it to a story that turned out to be a multi-pronged synchronicity. Of course that’s the point of the post.
A friend of hers, Jay, turned in a rental car and forgot his garage-door opener in it. He went back to the rental agency and found out the car had been rented already and no one had noticed the opener. Meanwhile, Jay was supposed to meet someone for lunch that day and realized that he’d forgotten his credit card in a bar the night before. (And I thought I was forgetful.) He needed the card to pay for lunch and the bar wouldn’t open for another three hours. What was he to do? In spite of the annoyances, he stayed calm and expressed gratitude, trusting that things would work out.
As Pam tells the story: He went to his bank to withdraw some cash for lunch, and was surprised to see his former rental car in the parking lot. He walked over to the man who was standing next to the car talking on his cell phone and told him about the lost garage-door opener. He asked to take a look inside, and sure enough, there it was.
Jay figured he was on a roll and decided on a hunch to drop by the bar where he’d left his card, even though it wouldn’t open for hours. When he arrived, the owner of the bar was sitting outside, also talking on his cell phone. After Jay explained about the card, the man said, “You’re really lucky, I usually don’t get here until three. But I came early today to meet my carpet cleaner.”
Pam concludes: Jay, of course, knew it wasn’t luck. Just further proof that magic is always afoot as long as we don’t create ‘problems’ to block it.”
Good story; good synchro.
What an ironic synchronicity.
A kind of trickster, I think!