Synchronicity

"I... believe in an everyday sort of magic -- the inexplicable connectedness we sometimes experience with places, people, works of art and the like; the eerie appropriateness of moments of synchronicity...." Charles de Lint

This past week a friend of mine had a baby. She was born on 1/11/11, at 3:03 pm, and weighed 5 lbs 15 oz. Numbers tend to flit by me rather like sparrows in the park, (oh look, it's a bird) and I totally missed the way they lined up until another friend pointed it out. Two days ago, as I was struggling to break free of a sticky section of the novel I'm revising, I discovered that not one, not two, but three of my online writer friends were all stuck on the same page of their corresponding works in progress. The fact that it was Page 13 we were all struggling with is another weird little piece of reality.

Synchronicity? Maybe. According to Marie Louise von Franz, Synchronicity…means a ‘meaningful coincidence’ of outer and inner events that are not themselves causally connected. The emphasis lies on the word ‘meaningful’.

It's highly possible that a bunch of writers all stuck at the beginning of a work in progress isn't meaningful - hell, we're always stuck somewhere. And I doubt that my friend's baby is going to grow up to be some super heroine or Messianic figure or any such thing. Still, as I travel through time I find these weird little clusters of events fascinating.

Why am I blogging about synchronicity during Time week? Well, if there was no time there could be no synchronicity. That said, time as measured in the modern world has always seemed like an artificial construct to me. I have learned to abide by its rules so I can function in a world where everything happens according to a clock and a calendar, but it isn't easy. Synchronicity on the other hand, makes total sense: apparently random events intersect at a certain point in time and something significant changes because of it. Like De Lint, I find this magical, and I am usually filled with delight when I notice the synchronicities in my world.

Not always.

Marcella posted yesterday about the days where you are "the windshield" and the ones where you are "the bug." See - I hate those bug days, because it seems I've walked into some little patch of time where everything is just off. You know the days I mean - the ones where everything happens just a few minutes too early or a few minutes too late, you feel like you're missing something all day long, and the result is total chaos. The absence of synchronicity, or asynchronicity, if you will. Everybody has those days. What we usually say is something like "my timing is off" or "I'm running behind."

Maybe we're not. Maybe Destiny is involved, and these are the times when we are meant to slow down, when we are fighting a course of events designed to put us somewhere where we are meant to be at the time we are meant to be there. My logical brain resists this idea, my creative side embraces it.

For certain when we write, we play the role of Destiny, directing our characters toward their inevitable fate. Here's another quote, this time from Terry Pratchett:

"And if you want the story, then remember that a story does not unwind. It weaves. Events that start in different places and different times all bear down on that one tiny point in space-time, which is the perfect moment." ~Thief of Time

Art echoes life, life echoes art, and who is to say that reality doesn't work this way as well?

I leave you with a clip from the movie INK, which demonstrates this fascinating process much better than I could ever do with words:




Photo Image by pschubert