Trish and I were in my office yesterday evening talking about some good news we’d heard about Seven Secrets of Synchronicity. I looked over her shoulder at a bookshelf and focused on a novel that one of us had bought years ago, but neither of us had read. The news we were discussing was that our book would be a hard cover, that the editor was promoting it as a lead book for August, and that it was already listed on Amazon.com and the Barnes & Noble site. The name of the novel on the shelf? Coincidence.
I pulled down the novel and later read the first few pages. The author is David Ambrose, and I remembered reading another of his novels years ago and really enjoying it. That one was called The Man Who Turned into Himself. Considering the title of the book in my hand and the question that Nancy Atkinson had brought up yesterday about distinguishing coincidence from synchronicity, led me to the idea of putting up a few ‘meaningful’ paragraphs from the novel.
The protagonist is a non-fiction writer, named George Daley, who writes non-fiction books that he describes as “occupying a no-man’s-land between real science and fantastical speculation.” He has written about poltergeists, ESP of various kinds, stone circle, ley lines, pyramids. Of course, I thought, hmm, those are also the kind of books I happen to write.
George Daley, however, can’t figure out what he’s going to write about next as the story opens. He’s drinking a scotch and staring out the window at the fall colors and thinking about his father who lives in a retirement home in New England when the phone rings. It’s the retirement home calling to inform him that his father has just died. So picking up the story…
***
“I thanked her for letting me know so quickly and said I’d take a train up in the morning. She agreed that there was no point in my rushing up immediately. She herself would make arrangements with the funeral home if I wished. I said I would be grateful for that and thanked her again.
“When I hung up I didn’t move for some time, just stood there looking at my reflection in the window, watching it grow clearer moment by moment as the light outside faded. What were you supposed to feel, I asked myself, on learning of your father’s death? Was there something specific, something deep-rooted in the psyche, a special sense of loss? Or growth perhaps? And how remarkable that I should have been thinking of him at that very moment when the call came.
“Except, of course, it wasn’t remarkable at all. The association of trees, New England, the fact of having spoken to him that morning, and of feeling slightly guilty about putting off my next visit to him as long as I could explained the coincidence. But I felt no rush of remorse, no sense of unfinished business as a result of having missed that last chance to see him, no lack of ‘closure,’ as your local corner therapist would call it. I felt nothing that I hadn’t been feeling half an hour earlier. The only difference was that my father had been alive then and was dead now. A simple fact.
“But, although I didn’t consciously know it then, I had found both the subject and the title of my next book.
Coincidence.”
***
So there’s a whole web of synchronicities here, within the story and outside of it. George in denying meaningful coincidence inadvertently discovers meaningful coincidence, and that will be the subject of his next book. Meanwhile, on the outside, Nancy had mentioned that her husband, like George, had puzzled over the difference between coincidence and synchronicity. Trish had recently posted about her father’s death, and I spotted the book as we were talking about our own book on meaningful coincidences.
Synchronicities galore.
Rob
