A Word and a Story — Synchronicity
Synchronicity (German: Synchronizität) is a concept, first introduced by analytical psychologist Carl Jung, which holds that events are “meaningful coincidences” if they occur with no causal relationship yet seem to be meaningfully related. — Wikipedia
Jung’s belief was that, just as events may be connected by causality, they may also be connected by meaning.
What follows is a short personal essay about synchronicity.
I use an assortment of Journaling Apps: Journey, Journal It, Notion, Trello, and a Notebook. I don’t really need so many apps but I use them because I am trying to figure out the best app that suits my journaling needs.
A feature I like about Journey is the ‘Throwback Entries’ that I enjoy reading because they show me what I was thinking about last month or last year or even two years back. But what happened on July 11 (about a week back) was very unusual.
I wrote a short fiction story about Dystopia in this post: A Word and a Story — Dystopia. The story was about how humanity had enslaved itself to technology and machines and how nature whispered a way out to the protagonist.
Later that evening I escaped to my phone after a rather tiring day of home cleaning and saw that day’s throwback entries in my journal. There was one from two years back. It was about a dream I had the night before. It read:
I was with an old friend. We sat in an auto controlled car which took us straight to his grandparent’s house, without asking where we wanted to go. Why? I don’t know but the car took its own decision for reasons unknown to me.
I think it’s quite a synchronicity to write about how technology might take over the Earth someday and then reading a two-year-old dream on the exact same theme.
Just in case you are thinking that I may have read about my dream earlier and then subconsciously wrote about the same theme in the story, let me assure you that no such thing had happened. I never look at throwback entries until after dinner and that day was no exception.
For those who believe, synchronicities are said to be messages from the Universe. So what was the Universe trying to tell me? Maybe it was telling me that I was a slave to my social media feeds and they were taking my life in a direction which was not of my choosing and that if I wanted to take back control of my life, it would do well to connect with nature.
The message was relevant for me and synchronistically (I just made up this word) it may be relevant for you also.
