Last year when I met a dear school mate after close to three decades, she remarked that just before she reached the café of our assignment, she encountered two instances that seemed to strongly resonate—in a prescient way—with our long association. “I was browsing the CD rack at the book store next door, and I spotted a collection of Tamil songs!” This was surprising why? Because this was a tiny store in the preppy part of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and I am one of the few Tamil-speaking friends. “And then a little while later my eye fell on this mathematics book, in the popular non-fiction section.” The reason for remarking on this? My father was a mathematics professor, and this was a subject she had always connected with me (although I have little to do with it and even less affinity for it!).
“Everything seemed to be telling me I was going to meet you!”
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We all get these earworm infestations from time to time, right? A song worms its way into our head and refuses to find a way out, taking up residence with endless replays. So it was with this song by Passenger that I first heard covered by a group of pre-teens at a music festival, which stayed with me for weeks, and then, just as suddenly as it had entered, it quit. Like, totally and completely, vacated my conscious mind. Several months later, I was trying hard to think about this song, remembering only that I had liked it, but with no more than a vague sense of the sound. Try as I might, the notes wouldn’t come back to me. In the evening of that same day, as I walked down the stairs of a subway station, I heard the strains of a platform band—playing my song!
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My father was born in the month of January and died in the month of April. My father in law was born in the month of April and died in the month of January. They were very good friends, sharing a deep, almost spiritual connection. There’s even a strange symmetry of sorts in the dates: my father’s birthday is January 1, while my father in law’s death anniversary is January 11. My father in law’s birthday is April 26 and my father passed away on April 21. The months therefore bring bittersweet memories for me, but in a way they also serve to remind one that birth, death, and everything in between…it’s all part of the game of life.
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You have a dream about someone and happen to meet them the following day. You have a dream about someone and they call you with some important news soon after. You have a dream about someone and it turns out to be surprisingly premonitory. You think a thought and you find it echoed in the newspaper the next day.
Life is full of such apparently surprising coincidences. Or perhaps we see them as coincidences because we are constantly on the lookout for patterns, for ways to read meaning into our otherwise untidy lives.
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The idea of synchronicity—the apparent connection between acausal psychic and physical phenomena--is most famously associated with Carl Jung, who is best known for his work on psychoanalytic theory. The writer Paul Levy describes it as “meaningful coincidence” when “our internal, subjective state appears, as if materialized in, as and through the outside world”.
While many rationalists might dismiss the idea as fanciful mumbo-jumbo, something that springs from our innate desire to make sense and bring order to the randomness of life, our wish to believe that there is some grand design to existence. Putting meaning into synchronous events allows us to see our lives as a narrative. And whether one reads meaning into such events, or whether the occurrence of such events is inherently meaningful, depends on which side of the mysticism-rationalism divide one stands.
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I myself am a skeptical rationalist—if there is such a thing. I believe there are scientific (or rule-based) explanations for most things, but I also allow that there may be phenomena that are beyond our current understanding, and therefore am hesitant to discount the beliefs of those who argue for a mystical explanation for acausal coincidences.
After all, the most innovative theories in science have come from the willingness to make a conceptual leap to connect disparate bits of evidence in an explanatory framework. And the greatest literature has come from drawing a design into the apparent randomness of human existence.
For now, I’m going to take refuge in another song that had been relegated to the shadows of memory…here’s Synchronicity of a different kind!
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