What a Coincidence!

Synchronicity, YELLOW, and Trust

My phone lay on the bed across the room from me— and although I hadn’t heard from her in a month—when I heard the ping of a new text, I knew it was Erin. Why? Because I had just been thinking about her. Hasn’t this been your experience too? Sometimes when I’m thinking about a person, I take note and anticipate, routinely now, that I will hear from them. Or I know that it’s my sign to make that connection happen—and they’ll say, almost immediately—hey, just thought of you. Fishy, right? Woo-woo, perhaps? Not really.

I’ve always loved coincidence stories. George Musser in Nautilus begins his article “Coincidences in My Life Have Me Wondering: My Search For a Hidden Structure to Astronomically Unlikely Occurrences” recounting how he kept running into the same person in unlikely places on his travels in Africa as a young man. He muses on probability theories put forth by statisticians, but also admits that he falls for the whimsy of it too.

A Chinese saying goes: “If there’s no coincidence, there won’t be stories.”

The most unlikely coincidence story I heard was the one recounted on This American Life. A young man is considering making his relationship with a woman he’s been dating more exclusive. He’s going to ask her that night at dinner. For lunch, he gets a sub at a deli and hands over a dollar bill then hastily takes it back because the name Esther is hand-printed on the dollar. It’s the name of the girl he’s meeting. He frames it with some gold foil and gives it to her at dinner. She acts odd though gracious and accepts the gift and also becomes his girlfriend. Years later, the two are married and moving into a house when he unearths the framed dollar and asks her why she responded so strangely. The truth is she decided to keep quiet then to see how her fate would unwind; however, years before she met him, disgusted by dating, she wrote her name on about 10 dollar bills and decided that the guy who got it would be the man she married.

For me, coincidences enrich our lives the way stories do and they also show the nature of our entanglement. Though Musser discusses probability theory, he doesn’t go to the science of quantum entanglement or what Carl Jung and physicist Wolfgang Pauli named “synchronicity”—a term for meaningful coincidences that defy classical cause-and-effect.

In my research for Yellow, I found that Einstein couldn’t explain this phenomenon which he called “Spooky Action at a Distance,” described in this graphic:

Theories and discussions on quantum entanglement propose that consciousness itself might be woven into an interconnected fabric, causing our inner thoughts to occasionally cohere with external events.

My novel Yellow, not coincidentally, wouldn’t have come to be without quantum entanglement. Getting an agent for a book is half the battle, and I’d already queried about 75 agents; so, for my last batch of query letters, I decided to introduce Yellow, themselves, as a character:

Meet Physarum Polycephalum, a yellow one-celled organism that has over 700 genders, is immortal, and, some say, has a consciousness. This slime mold, brainless, eyeless, yet capable of memory and problem-solving, resides in its own exhibit in the Paris Zoo and is a scholar-in-residence at Hampshire College.

It just so happens that my agent Malaga Baldi is a graduate of Hampshire College. She thought I had researched her biography to find that fact, but no, her profile had caught my eye, and she and about ten other prospective agents received the same letter. I wrote about our synchronicity in a short piece for Shewrites.com. I thank the universe (or fun & spooky actions at a distance) for our meeting because she’s made it all a dream come true.

Like the physarum’s goal of interconnection back to IT(them)self, my novel YELLOW yearns for the often invisible threads of human entanglement. In these times of increasing authoritarianism worldwide, we can see how the very menacingly “spooky actions” of world leaders and the broligarchy as both a negative entanglement and a last-gasp resistance to a collective interconnection that threatens their individual egos.

Rather than resignation, I want to replace my feeling about the future with trust. Trust in the process, trust in the invisible forces of interconnection. My friend John Lebo came up with the idea that an alternative to Jung’s collective unconscious is the idea of a “collective consciousness between all living things.”

Kindred spirits: What meaningful coincidences have happened to you or others? I would love to hear how synchronicity has come into your lives…& your thoughts on the a collective consciousness.