What is synchronicity?

One thing that has come into my life in the last year and a half is spirituality.  Growing up I was very religious.  I aspired to be as sin-free as the Virgin Mary.  I knew all of the stories from the Bible.  I went to Catholic school and church most Sundays.  But I'm not really sure I ever had much first-hand experience with unseen powers, though I desperately wanted God to speak to me.  I was superstitious until sometime in college when I let science fill all the voids, and believed that there was no mystery in the world that science couldn't solve.  Maybe I misinterpreted the nature of science, but I allowed myself to become cold and hard and boring.  I didn't believe in magic anymore.

The loss of the belief in magic was tragic.  I thought it was just about growing up--like when you find out Santa isn't real.  I also decided that God wasn't real, an invention to end the fear in death or to control others.

But then, synchronicity happened.  Synchronicity is a name for meaningful coincidences--when two related things happen simultaneously but don't cause each other to happen.  Jung wrote about it in the 1920s.  It is defined in Wikipedia as "the experience of two or more events that are apparently causally unrelated or unlikely to occur together by chance, yet are experienced as occurring together in a meaningful manner."  (The concept is completely obscure and ridiculous sounding until it is experienced first hand).

I just found out about synchronicity last summer. I'm a librarian and one day I was sitting at the reference desk writing an email to a friend about a music-related project we were developing, when a guy came up to me and introduced himself.  He was a library science student with an undergrad degree in music.

It seemed like a great coincidence--we needed another team member to get involved in the project and then he appeared and chose that moment to introduce himself (I had seen him around the library several times before, but we'd never talked).  I added his contact details to the email I was sending.  My friend responded, "get used to some high level synchronicities" with this type of work.  I had never heard the term before, so I read the Wikipedia article about the topic.  And then I moved on, kind of forgetting about synchronicity, but thinking that maybe there was something special about this guy which I was being clued in to.

As it turned out, this guy and I did end up having a sort of magical connection.  I still feel like there is more to it, and we've never really chatted much since we first met--my involvement on the music project stopped and we never invited him to any meetings.  However, three months after I met him, I got a new full-time job.  I went in to tell my boss that I would be leaving.  That same day he decided, out of the blue, to turn in his resume at the place I was leaving, even though no job announcement had been posted.  He got the job, filling my place.  Other library students had tried to apply there previously when no job posting was up, and they'd been rejected or asked to serve as a volunteer.  So he got really lucky...or he was the beneficiary of a gift from some unseen force.  Meanwhile, I was also aided by an incredible force in finding my new job.

There were many, many synchronicities associated with finding my current job. Right now I just want to mention one. On the day I went in to interview, the HR person who interviewed me was walking me down the main hallway of the hospital to the exit. At that moment, I ran into a woman who I'd been tutoring at my former job--she was an employee at the place I was interviewing.  She asked me what I was doing there and when I told her she immediately gave a glowing recommendation directly to the interviewer.  Needless to say, I got the job.  Since then, in the entire year I've been working there, I've never again run into her in the main hallway, though I walk down it multiple times every day.  However, she has stopped in to visit me in my library, just to chat. She's been working in a new location and only comes into the hospital one day a week, which may explain why I so rarely see her.  A few weeks ago we were talking about the changes at my former job (where she still goes to read on a regular basis) and she mentioned the guy with whom I have a "magical connection".  It turns out that she knew him before he worked there because he was the pianist at her church.  And she talked about how much she was hoping he would find a good job.  So it seems there is a bit of triangular magic that connects the three of us.

The connection with this guy was the first of many synchronicities which I've experienced in the last year.