Synchronicity Really Is a Strange Thing

I think about these things a lot – coincidence, destiny, luck, all of it. Or maybe I don't think about them all that much but they do come up every once in a while. The weird thing is though, when they do come up, they do so with quite a bit of force. As such it's tempting to think synchronicity really is real, and that all these little details and little moments in our path were placed there specifically for us, kinda like a helpful NPC in a video game, either giving us a nudge towards the right direction or heralding the coming of a great advent, whatever the case may be. Other times though, moments of synchronicity don't seem to mean anything at all, or at least nothing serious comes out of them, and so whatever meaning they do have, it's hard to tell if it is truly there and we just need to find it, or if whatever meaning we do find is nothing more than a made-up thing. In that sense, I suppose, a theory that can't be proven wrong isn't a very good one, and a theory that can keep taking on information no matter what, always shape-shifting in order to accommodate it, is bound to be a bad theory. Either way, I'm not here to prove one thing or the other, I'm just here to muse along and to share a bit of funny synchronicity.

   Nonna, mi racconti che cosa facevi quando eri piccola. Come trascorrevate i pomeriggi?

   Prima facevamo i compiti, poi ci incontravamo tutte a casa mia, perché avevo un grande giardino. Giocavamo senza giochi veri, ma con tanta fantasia e ci divertivamo molto. Avevo anche un cane. Si chiamava Nero.

I don't know why a synchro card would be summoned by a ritual spell card, but still...

Not a great story but here goes... I took some italian classes once. Beautiful language to be sure, and I like it. Nothing very exciting happened during them classes, though. They were online classes with a very nice but very methodical teacher. Her blood was certainly italian but her brain was all german, I'd say. There were no chill moments as such, and so that, plus the online nature of these classes, created a strictly business-like environment. Still, or maybe precisely because of it, I learned a fair bit. I learned, for example, that my dog's name was the same word for the color black in italian. It's a nice coincidence because he was indeed a black dog. That would be enough of a coincidence, but then at the tail end of the class I came across that bit of text there when we were learning the imperfect tense, and to be perfectly honest it did hit me as a lightning bolt of synchronicity. Translated into english it goes,

   Grandmother, tell me what you used to do when you were little. How did you spend the afternoons?

   First we'd do the homework, then we'd all meet up at my house, because I had a big garden. We'd play without actual games, but with so much imagination and we'd have a lot of fun. I also had a dog. His name was Nero.

Now, I'm not a grandmother. Sadly, or maybe just neutrally, I never will be. But I did in fact have a dog named Nero, a dog I still miss to this day. But I didn't set out to write about him yet again, I've done enough of that already, even if I can't help mentioning this best friend of mine, even if only in passing. What I did set out to write about was this funny coincidence, so funny and so coincidental that I didn't resist copying that little bit of text from my worksheet during class, and then I kept it in my notes for a fairly long while until, when looking over them in search for something to write about, I figured, hey, it's as good a time as any.

Incidentally, I went for a job interview this here week, and halfway through it the interviewer mentioned how this Carlos fella was very nice and they got along well for the most part, but he weren't never no good with punctuality. And it occurred to me how this one fella not keeping track of time led to a job vacancy, and me casually scrolling through the job-search website led to an application, which in turn led to an interview. Sadly, or maybe neutrally, I didn't get the job, but it is funny to think of how all these little things have to happen in order for something big to happen. It also did occur to me how if I had gotten that job I might have fallen in love with the HR lady. She had a tight-lipped smile, and she had those dark circles under her eyes that seemed to always make her look sleepy. But anyway, I ain't got the job, part me of ain't even want it, but it is what it is. Thing is, if I had gotten the job, the wisdom of “it is what it is” would have led to something completely different, and for all I know my life would never have been the same thereafter. Two roads would have diverged in the yellow wood, and all that jazz.

Then again, it's strange to say life would have been completely different. Different than what? Hard to compare what something actually is to what it maybe could have been, because by definition the alternative don't exist. Furthermore, it don't exist yet and it now never will exist. Life as I know it on that job will never take place, the threads of causality didn't close on that place for me, today's sun has set on a great big nothing... Those threads just as easily could have closed in that other way, but truth is they haven't, so here we have an example of why synchronicity sometimes seems to work, because we seemingly discount all the times it didn't quite work out. At the end of the day, life is a series of inputs, it's just things that keep happening, and for that reason, the results have to be read out sometime because no game lasts forever. Eventually someone wins big, someone loses, and someone gets just enough of either one to keep on playing.

But why are coincidences meaningful? Or maybe coincidences are merely coincidental?... Either way there's no easy answer from me. I can see some people who might describe themselves as “not religious but spiritual” immediately saying that yes, coincidences don't exist and in reality all these moments of synchronicity have their deep meaning rooted somewheres. And I can also see people who might describe themselves as “logical and reasonable” saying that no, coincidences aren't meaningful, it's just a matter of reading meaning into them. So now I ain't so sure of anything... I can see the former being quite pink and colorful, and the latter being a tad dogmatic but worse than that, a tad boring. All this to say that my answer to the matter of coincidences is that maybe it ain't true, maybe there's no proper meaning to any of them, but it's a little more fun to believe there is. Or at the very least it's nice to sometimes while away the time thinking about it all.

Maybe I could then say I choose my words advisedly, and that “funny” really is the best word with which to describe synchronicity. Maybe all it is is funny, it's funny that early on in my italian class I realized my dog's name meant “black” the entire time, and that by the tail end of it I was faced with a text that directly mentions someone's dog of the same name. I suppose it is a common name, I suppose it's not outside of the realm of possibility that such a thing would happen, and therefore maybe it don't mean much... But at the same time, regardless of the mathematical chances of this or the arithmetical chances of that, the fact of the matter is that it did indeed happen to me. What to then do with it is up to the individual, and as for me I don't intend to do much with it except to write down these few words here as a reminder. I guess the simple truth is that, as I went through my notes, deleting some useless ones and neatly organizing others, I simply couldn't resist this one about the italian grandma's old dog named Nero, and my old dog named Nero... And so here it is, a reminder, long after my italian class is over and my teacher and my classmates have long since moved on, and longer still have they forgotten me.

And therein lies the question, because at least to me there's an inherent link between synchronicity and nostalgia... Because moving on is as inevitable as old time, or at least if you don't move on, then others move on without you, leaving you behind. But even though you're behind you still moved on, because time didn't wait for you. In this sense and many others it's nice to know there's some logic to all this, that our moves have these set outcomes, or that the meaning behind at least some of our choices is placed there for us like it would be in a book or a movie. Most days life isn't very cinematic, it seldom is unless you take the time to notice it, but at the same time, noticing it makes it less cinematic almost by default. It's just one of those things... And this is all to say that I miss the people of my past, people who I at times come to believe were placed there specifically for me to meet, as if in a book or a movie or even a video game, only for them to one day leave me as I likewise one day up and left them, leaving only the faint memory of them, and the powerful memory of having met them in the first place.

Now that I think of it, if moments of synchronicity, or meaningful coincidence as it is so often called, are what makes a story in a book meaningful, then does that mean that synchronicity not existing in real life makes real life meaningless? I don't know but maybe, or at least it does take some of the spice out of it. Then again, things can indeed be random, and the meaningful meaning can simply be a thing we attribute to make sense of senseless things. And although solipsism can almost be cozy, feeling like the main character in a story as though the entire world revolves around us is indeed a thing best avoided. But still, having said all that, doesn't it sting a little to go through the motions of everyday life without a little something extra, without feeling as though, while the choices are still ultimately up to you, some dice throws have been rigged in your favor? I think it does, and like I said before, if things are occasionally rigged in our favor, then eventually everyone gets to win a little something. It has been said that if everyone is special then no one is, but I suppose I'm inclined to lean on the tautology and say that if everyone is special then everyone is special.

And as to everyone else, all the people we meet along the way, my classmates from the italian gig, for example, whether they forget us or not is ultimately beyond our control, as it is beyond our control whether we remember them or not. But it is true and always will be true that a series of very tiny events with all their intricate details had to take place for these people to come into our lives, and when the day of our final meeting came, though we might not have been quite aware of it at the time, we carried on happily just the same, moving on to a new event, a new detail, and a whole new set of people to meet. And even if at the end of the day there's no synchronicity and this whole existence thing is just randomness after randomness after randomness, then when all is said and done and we look back on our lives as if flicking through tired pages of a book, then we can say that most of all, or at the very least, or all things considered, or at the end of the day, we've been lucky.