I find synchronicity fascinating. Sometimes a coincidence is just so striking and uncanny that it is downright spooky.
It especially fascinates me when such an incident saves someone’s life.
Once I saw a fellow who worked in a cement factory who had recently been minutes from death. He was sitting in his car in a concealed quarry about to lose consciousness from carbon monoxide poisoning.
It was in the early days of mobile phones. He had one on the seat beside him. It rarely rang, but it rang then. The fortunate timing saved his life.
He somehow then felt that he was meant to live. Together we realised that undergoing change through a crisis was a bit like the production of cement.
There is a period before cement goes hard that it is a gooey mess. It could be shaped in different ways. He realised that his life had been at the gooey mess stage. Things were malleable enough that a different, more stable, course could be readily shaped.
Within a few weeks he was neither suicidal, nor depressed. Within months he was flourishing.
Perhaps an even more startling example involved a blackbird.
When my client learnt that I was writing a book on synchronicity he felt he could safely tell me this story without being judged as psychotic. He explained that a year earlier he had been kneeling in front of a window pane with a pistol in his mouth, about to pull the trigger.
He then noticed a blackbird, like a raven, looking towards him from about 20m away. It suddenly took flight directly at him at full speed. It smashed into the window pane immediately in front of him and fell down dead.
In the following “brief moment of clarity” he felt that the blackbird had sacrificed itself for him. He was then convinced that he was meant to live. He then booked himself into a rehabilitation program and overcame a chronic alcohol and ice addiction.
In the following year he married, fathered a child, returned to full-time work and continues to prosper.
As I said, I find synchronicity fascinating, and never more than when it saves people’s lives. It’s saved mine too, but that’s another story.
Many situations are less dramatic than this. However, I have heard from a great number of people over the years of how a particularly uncanny happening helped turn their lives around.
I have heard of such examples so often that I cannot dismiss them as superstitious thinking.
There are many ways in which we can emerge from a dark place to eventually feel that we are back on track in our lives or in pursuing some goal.
When people recognise a fortuitous incident to be particularly uncanny and meaningful in helping turn things around, in a way that they feel is “meant to be”, it can greatly enhance their sense of life purpose and meaning.