I’m curious – have you noticed a higher than normal occurrence of synchronicities in your life recently? Since the start of 2018 I’m noticing more than average instances of perfect timing, small world moments, and tremendously convenient coincidences. It’s getting spooky.

For example… This Friday Howard and I are having dinner with a very successful producer and his wife. You might recall from an earlier blog post that I’ve been using this trip to LA to see if there might be interest in a feature film based on my life story. For the last few months, I’ve been describing the project as “Erin Brockovich meets Life of Pi”. Earlier in January, just as I was finishing lunch with Michael Palin (did I mention I’d had lunch with Michael Palin?!) another friend of his dropped by. That friend had worked with Michael on A Fish Called Wanda, and also happened to be one of the producers on…. Erin Brockovich.

Coincidence? Manifestation? Who knows.

The most recent occurrence happened about an hour ago. This morning I delivered a keynote for Kaiser Permanente here in Huntington Beach, California. All went well, and I was enjoying a relaxing afternoon when I decided to go get a cup of tea from the coffee shop on the far side of the resort. On the way, I bumped into someone I had last seen two years ago at a different conference and had really got along well with. He works for Kaiser Permanente too, but wasn’t meant to be at this conference. How lucky that I chose that particular moment to schlep over to get my afternoon cuppa, that I chose that particular route, and that Wade also happened to be walking that way.

Funnily enough, Wade mentioned that he’s experiencing a lot of perfect timings this year, which got me thinking….

Is this a widespread phenomenon?

Neither of the instances above is remarkable in themselves, but I have experienced at least half a dozen other significant examples since the start of the year. Perhaps I think of a person I haven’t heard from in years, and shortly thereafter get an email from them. A single concept, that I may never have heard of before, crops up three times in as many days. I arrive in LA, and by chance a disproportionate number of my friends happen to be in town. Even though I can find no logical reason (in a linear Newtonian world) why these things happen, it feels as if they are not random (could this be a quantum world?).

What is going on here?

You can make up your own mind on the meaning (or lack thereof) of synchronicities, but there are definitely those who believe they are  significant.

Around 2002 or 2003, I read a book that changed my worldview: The Celestine Prophecy. The narrator is in a transitional period of his life – as indeed I was at that time – and begins to notice instances of synchronicity, which lead him like a sequence of clues into a spiritual adventure. “Coincidences” become something important to pay attention to.

The term synchronicity was first coined by Carl Gustav Jung to describe events that have no apparent causal connection, but to the person who experiences them there is a subjective sense that there is a meaningful connection. Lots more on this on Wikipedia’s Synchronicity entry.

I had an aged friend, who sadly passed on a number of years ago. Sir John Rawlins was fascinated by synchronicities, and along with a friend he recorded all such events in a notebook. He believed that an acceleration of synchronistic occurrences would be significant. Too bad he’s not around for me to ask him what he believed the significance to be.

So I will ask you. I have three questions:

Myself, I choose to believe that synchronicities are like a little wink from the Universe. We may often feel we live in a VUCA* world, where all is chaos and randomness, but once in a while the veil is lifted, and we see that there is, if not exactly a plan, then at least some degree of method to the madness. And then we can relax into the flow and know that we don’t travel alone.

*(A military acronym: Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous – also the subject of my keynote this morning, on Navigating the Future)

Other Stuff:

Having a fabulous time in LA  – catching up with old friends and forging new connections. Tonight we have a screening of my Atlantic documentary in Marina del Mar. If you’re interested, and/or if you know film industry people, please contact Autumn Udell for further details.

Spent the weekend in San Diego brainstorming a new project I’m working on – a global women’s network. Once #MeToo has finished venting millennia of fury, we need a new vision to come into play: a world in which masculine and feminine are in balance. I am fascinated with creating that vision. More on that soon.

Next week we go to Mexico City and Tepoztlan. Tepoztlan was one of the Universe’s best efforts this year – I’d never heard of it before, and yet it turns out that a team of radically innovative software developers that I want to meet just happen to be there, about an hour and a half outside Mexico City. Happy coincidence indeed.