Searching for Synchronicity

By Paul Roberts

Greetings, New Year! May our relationship be as rich and full of synchronicity as was my time with your older brother, 2023!

Synchronicity: the simultaneous occurrence of events which appear significantly related but have no discernible causal connection.

Spiritually, synchronicity means living with the understanding that I am a soul and that I am not alone on this journey of life; that I have divine guidance available to me at all times; that there is a divine organizing intelligence at work and that there is a cause and effect relationship to every single thing in the universe.

Do I really believe that? Sounds kind of “new age-y,” and as a pastor’s kid in the 70’s, I knew to be careful around such concepts. But as a retired teacher turned writer/voracious reader/creator in the decade of the 2020’s, recognizing moments of synchronicity brings joy and satisfaction to my life. Synchronicity makes me giggle.

Christmas was good to me, and the last week of 2023, my mornings were spent with five new books. Mornings are my non-fiction reading time, and the more I read, the easier it is to juggle the ideas coming at me from a wide variety of sources. Five books at a time? If I choose to, I can manage that. Even if the topics seem to be completely unrelated to one another.

However, the universe is a strange place. Someone once said “You can’t judge a book by it’s cover.” I assumed that I would find very little in common between the 300 plus paged, small font, heavily researched and indexed, New York Times best seller Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, by Susan Cain, with its soothing, quietly inviting grey cover; and the mere 170-ish paged, large font, reasonably indexed Hot Sauce Nation: America’s Burning Obsession, by Denver Nicks, with its garishly screaming red/white/yellow/green cover, the Statue of Liberty’s torch replaced by an upside down bottle of hot sauce.

Surely, the crossover between these two books would be miniscule.

But, once again, the universe is a strange place.

And so it was that just a few mornings past, I spent a quiet moment with Susan Cain’s Quiet, enjoying her deep thoughts as she discussed the American phenomenon of extroverted leadership, especially in evangelical Pastor Rick Warren’s Saddleback church. I appreciated the skill of her writing, wishing that I could seamlessly incorporate a quote from Proust into my own writing (“Hm. Marcel Proust? French guy, I think. Look him up later.”)

I finished the chapter, closed that tome, picked up Hot Sauce, and flipped to where I had left off, Denver Nick’s discussion about the condiment LBI Love Potion, one of his favorites. I began to read, and there it was, right before the page break in the text. Nicks quoted Marcel Proust. (“Say, Denver. Look at you. Going all scholarly on me.”) I turned the page, and my eyes were immediately drawn to the italicized quote that started the next chapter - a quote from Rick Warren, pastor and hot sauce aficionado!

So, 2024…New Year…let’s see what you’ve got. 2023 finished the year pretty strong. I’m still giggling over the way last year was able to bring me some synchronicity, helping me believe once more that it’s not all chaos out there in my universe. I’m going to be watching. Bring it on. 

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