Rob has been cleaning out folders in office closet and ran across some gems. One of the folders was filled with articles on synchronicity that he’d saved from the 1980s and 90s. The title of this post comes from an article that appeared in Reader’s Digest and was written by Edward Ziegler. He based the article on Arthur Koestler’s The Roots of Concidence and Alan Vaughn’s book Incredible Coincidences.
Here’s how it opens:
“You look up an unfamiliar word in the dictionary, then encounter the same word in the next few days. You write a letter to an old friend you haven’t heard from in years, and a note from him crosses in the mil. Blind chance ot something else?
“Orthodox science considers that coincidences like these are merely chance happenings.”
Fortunately, the study of synchronicity has come a long way since this article was written. Thanks to technology, we have practically immediate access to information and we can text and zoom and skype with people anywhere on the planet.
One of the mind-blowing synchros in this article was written about in Richard Bach’s book, Nothing by Chance. Bach isn’t just a bestselling author but also a pilot. While barnstorming in the Midwest in 1966 with a rare biplane, a 1929 Detroit-Parks P 2A Speedster. Only 8 of them had been built. In Palmyra, Wisconsin,
Bach loaned the plane to a friend, who upended it as he came in for a landing. As Bach wrote in his book, they were able to fix everything except for one strut.The repair looked hopeless because of the rarity of the needed part. But man came up and asked if he could help. Bach’s reply was sarcastic: “Sure. Do you happen to haave an inter-wing strut for a 1929 Detrpoit Speedster, model P-2A?”
The man walked over to his hangar and returned with the part. Bach wrote: “The odds against our breaking the biplane in a little town that happened to be home to a man with the 40-year-old part to repair it; the odds that he would be on the scene when the event happened; the odds that we’d pushed the plane right next to his hangar, within ten feet of the part we needed – the odds were so high that coincidence was a foolish answer.”
As Koestler noted, the great mathematician John von Neumann called the phenomenon “black magic.”
We call these kinds of synchronicities mind-blowers. Like Bach noted, the odds were staggering.
