Synchronicity is about personal meaning. A coincidence is just that, two things happening at the same time, that are worth a shrug and a, “That’s weird” comment. Synchronicity evolves from a similar sort of coincidence but it is filled with meaning for the person who experiences it.
You might force a connection on how things fit together in your life . Or you might believe things are nearly always unrelated. But if you find meaning in stumbling over a coin minted in you mother’s birth year on her birthday and it elicits a smile or a shiver at the time, then have endowed the two things with a meaningful relationship.
Synchronicity happening between two people seems quite important for bonding. I did not search out the literature again but early childhood bonding with parents is thought to include this. Running into a person you haven’t seen in years and deciding to go for a coffee where you learn you still share a large number of hobbies and passions might be seen as fortune smiling on both of you. But if you believe it means something and the other person does not, the skew in attribution might be a delusion of reference if you believe it is a sign of something, while the other person does not.
Writing about times your have felt a an incident to be a guiding event can help you identify events that were especially meaningful to you when you compare that incident to quite similar times that were far less meaningful.
An example I experienced was when my youngest brother and I were standing outside my father’s hospital room just after he died. It was Christmas Day. Mom was still in the room. My brother turned to me and said, “Well, he finally did it. He ruined Christmas.” For me Dad’s passing on that say was not great timing, but I did not attribute great meaning to his passing on that particular day. To my brother is had great meaning. I never found exactly what he saw as meaningful, but it probably related to his belief that our father had ill-will toward the rest of the family enjoying gift-giving, and special foods, and traditions. I did not see it the same way. To me it was coincidence, to him it was synchronicity; purposeful and meaningful.
At that moment I realized that we had profoundly different views of Dad and that he attributed sinister motive where I just saw agnostic belief.
Incorporating such varying views in a memoir can capture deep differences between people that cannot be easily captured in other ways. A variance in perceived motive, an attributed meaning, can be illuminated if you can identify specific instances where people have attached meaning to a co-occurrence in distinctly different ways.
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