Synchro about synchros

Diane Athill

One recent morning I pointed out an article to Trish that had come up on our Google alert for synchronicity . It began with a story of a novelist who had gotten an idea for a short story from a synchronicity. Since we were in the midst of preparing a proposal for a book on synchronicity and creativity, the story had caught my attention. In fact, finding it was a synchronicity…and then that synchronicity compounded.

Even though the Google alerts come to us daily, I rarely look at them anymore because so many of them have nothing to do with synchronicity – as we perceive it. The alert merely catches the word, which is often confused with synchronize, as in ‘let’s synchronize our watches.’ Also, an astonishing number of them refer to the Police album, Synchronicity, dating back to the ’80s.

In the story by Mark Vernon, which first appeared in The Guardian, novelist Diane Athill was walking her dog early one morning when a car slowed down and the driver, a stranger, asked if he could buy her a cup of coffee. The man looked very much like a lost old friend, who she recalled would have no problem approaching strangers in a similar fashion. The coincidence left her feeling ‘energized and strange’ and led to the creation of a short story.

The article goes on at some length to describe synchronicity and Carl Jung’s relationship with physicst Wolfgang Pauli. It’s well written and worth reading.

When Trish read the article, she mentioned that the author believed that meaningful coincidences were a rare occurrence. She disagreed with that assessment and noted that when you’re aware of synchronicities, they actually occur quite often. A neighbor who read The 7 Secrets of Synchronicity recently mentioned that she never thought about meaningful coincidence until reading the book, and now they happen all the time to her. Either the heightened awareness allows us to catch them before they pass away or that awareness causes them to occur more frequently.

But our synchronicity about synchronicity doesn’t stop there. Trish had no sooner made the comment when another Google alert came in. I opened it and found an article from a newspaper in British Columbia that had eerie similarities to the one I’d just read. While both articles give a similar definition of synchronicity near the beginning, amazingly the second article was about a man who encounters a stranger who starts a conversation and asks if he could buy him a cup of coffee!  Whoa! (I felt like I was reading a Steig Larrson novel with everyone talking about drinking coffee – as I was doing while reading these articles.)

When I told Trish about the similarities between the two articles about synchronicities, she first looked to cause and effect, suggesting that the second one was a take-off of the first. But that’s really unlikely since both authors were citing stories told to them by someone else.

It’s like Trish said, when you’re aware of synchros, they keep popping up.

If we weren’t sponsoring the Golden Scarab Synchro, I might enter that one! We’re still accepting stories until Friday, then we’ll start posting the five winning entries.