Synchronicity

I've been thinking a lot about my friend who was lost last Tuesday in a tragic car accident.  I'm remembering the lessons he taught me. This friend of mine loved people and he loved listening.  He kept his schedule flexible so that he could be there for you whenever you needed him, regardless of everything else he had going on in his life.  We were going to build an amazing friendship...we had this connection which made our conversations flow so naturally.  I was endlessly curious about him and who he really was underneath his constant joking...he sometimes came across as not all that serious but every now and then I would ask him a question about his field he would quote all of the top scholars on the subject and instantly articulate a gem of an answer.  He always commented on how much he enjoyed talking with me and I was curious about that too...about exactly why he enjoyed talking to me when I could never articulate my ideas...could never remember who I was...

In my last post  I wrote about a synchronicity which was meaningful enough to get me to return to post to my blog after a two-and-a-half-year hiatus.  The synch I described was related to my strong connection to a colleague, which became even stronger over this past month, June and July 2016.  Earlier this month I was struck by the sudden realization that he was married to my old therapist...a therapist who changed my life and was integral to one of my first major synchronicities in 2011, a turning point in my life which I wrote about here  (in the post I referred to my therapist as a friend--she was the one who told me I was between a rock and a hard place and also the one who had recommended Lerner's book). On July 4th I got to attend a party and sit down with my colleague and my old therapist.  I gave her a book about the use of synchronicity in therapy and a letter describing the role she had played in my transformation.  I was eager to sit down with ...

Sorry for my long absence.  I just wanted to make a quick note that my life is still full of synchronicity.   Since I last wrote I found my dream job in a seriously synchronous way--and it happened just a few weeks after getting rejected for another job which I thought was going to be perfect for me (I wrote about it in a previous post).  Even my skeptical husband pointed out how weird the circumstances were.  I have now been in the job for two years and have grown so much as a person that I can hardly recognize the new me. Today a huge synch hit me and nearly knocked the wind out of me.  It was so awesome.  I've met many people at my job and connected really well with many colleagues.  One in particular that I always seem to be able to have an awesome conversation with is a professor of psychology.  Yesterday we met for coffee and I told him that I liked chatting with him because it was like therapy for me.  And he replied that I get what ...

I've written in the past about synchronicities involving my four-year old son.  My son is very perceptive in general and this weekend he has again blown me away--this time by inspiring me to continue learning to cook. My husband is a great cook who can whip up a nutritious dinner out of nothing and I am a very insecure cook who has learned almost everything I know in the kitchen directly from him. Every once in a while I will get into a cooking-kick--once when I checked out Anna Venturi's " Secrets from an Italian Kitchen " from the library, once when I began following recipes from Rick Bayless' " Everyday Mexican " and for several years using my husband's recipes.  I've been taking a MOOC the last two or three weeks ( Just Cook--Child Nutrition & Cooking ) which has kicked me into action in the kitchen again. On a coworker's suggestion, I checked out Aaron Sanchez's recipes, and printed off his recipe for Birria on Friday.  My...

My last post was about losing synchronicity and the feeling of being abandoned by whatever force was engineering it in my life.  Over the course of the last several months I have had several interesting synchs, many of which I felt were leading me toward a big change in my career.  I was waiting to post about them to see if they would pan out, but they apparently led to nothing. This is not the first time this has happened.  I'm not sure if it is my fault for attempting to make sense of the coincidences that I stumble upon...it could be that the coincidences mean nothing and are really just coincidences, or it could be that I am misunderstanding the point of the synchronous occurrences in my life. It is, after all, easy to explain synchronicities so that they fit my own very limited perspective about what SHOULD happen.  It's harder to continue believing in them when what I was expecting doesn't happen. If I continue believing in synchronicity it has to be with ...

On the same day my son returned to school (or would have, if not for the heat and school cancellations), I returned to work.  Though I had been working part-time all summer, I received an offer for a full-time position at the end of August.  My first layoff and summer of unemployment was a journey, one which forced me to grow a lot, but also one which made me question the force behind synchronicity. For several years I have had a lot of faith in synchronicity--for me it has served as proof of a force at work in the world which scientists have yet to understand.  Though at times I do question whether synchronicity is a figment of my imagination, the more common theme for me this year was whether I had been forsaken by the force which had blessed me with synchronicity.  (By the way, I know this terminology sounds vaguely religious.  I'm not trying to hint that I know what's behind synchronicity.  I have no idea.  But my feelings about the forces at wor...

I was laid off in May and have been unemployed for two months.  So now I understand a little bit better what people have been going through the last several years.  I still haven't lost my insurance or unemployment benefits, so I still don't really understand. But I've gone from barely scraping by to not quite.  I still don't know what poverty is and I still don't know how bad it can get, but I'm beginning to understand how it feels to not be able to pay all my bills in a month.  It still feels like a social experiment, like the experiment undertaken by Barbara Ehrenreich in Nickle & Dimed , when she pretends not to have her educational background and spends a year working in minimum wage jobs (she tries working at Walmart, as a waitress, and as a maid cleaning houses and hotel rooms) and tries to make ends meet without using any of her usual resources. So I'm grinning like the Cheshire cat...just waiting for everything to fall into place.  Because I...