Synchronicity: How to Create Your
Own Luck
Humans are split
between two worlds: The first is the world of space and time, cause and effect,
energy and matter; the second is the world of histories and futures, stories
and meanings, memories and hopes.
The
happenings of the first world can be measured and predicted as a way to
understand the deep past and, sometimes, assume the far future. Cause and
effect connect this world: When you do something here, your actions are bound
by the logic unearthed by the laws of physics. This is the world your body
lives in, and it’s a world your body has to live in harmony with.
The
happenings of the second world, however, are complex and uncertain. They are a
product of the collisions that occur whenever a multitude of infinitely varied
experiences come together to produce new joint experiences. This is the world
of our individual and collective minds. Stories and meanings connect this
world. History is a story; the future is a story — memories
are shaped by meaning; hopes are shaped by meaning. And
it’s this second world that makes the first world rich and granular — that adds color where there
is otherwise only an outline.
When
these two worlds come into contact with each other, something interesting
happens. In a world without humans, physical processes are either deterministic
or random — things happen, and that’s
that. In a world with humans, however, they are that, sure, but they are also
judged to be good or bad relative to an observer — meaning
what happens in the world can be valued on a
spectrum, a spectrum of fortune and misfortune.
The
Oxford English Dictionary defines luck as: “Success or failure apparently
brought by chance rather than through one’s own actions.” This definition
suggests that you can’t ever create luck through your own efforts but you can
adjust your exposure to luck by managing your actions. The more intention you
apply, and the better that intention aligns with reality, the less you leave up
to chance. The less you leave up to chance, the less likely it is that bad luck
is going to disrupt your life, and the more likely it is that good luck simply
isn’t needed. In a way, this is the same as creating your own luck, but it
lacks the serendipity that makes luck what it is.
To
be lucky, then, can’t primarily be about action; it has to be about
interpretation, about what the meaning of something is. It’s not hard to
imagine how two people can have the same thing occur to them but make sense of
this thing very differently, where one considers it to be a great fortune,
while the other thinks of it as a great misfortune. The event itself is
secondary. The important thing is how well the event fits into the existing
story of the person experiencing said event.
Managing
our actions allows us to reduce the slings and arrows of chance in the first
world, the world of space and time, which alters our exposure to luck — both good and bad — but it’s only the second
world, the world of stories and meanings, that enables us to create what can be
called luck.
There
is an incident the psychotherapist Carl Jung shares in his biography about a
client he once had, a client that came to him at a low point in his life. Over
time, however, with the help of Jung, this client began to make progress. Not
only that, but he even developed a great friendship with Jung. But the client’s
wife, a possessive woman, didn’t like this. Jealous of the time her husband was
spending with his therapist, she asked the man to prematurely stop the sessions
against Jung’s best recommendations. And he did.
The
way Jung tells it is that a few months later, he was at a conference out of
town. He had just returned to his hotel room late at night, and as he was ready
to get into bed, he heard a loud crack and then felt a sudden pressure on his
skull. Looking around, he found nothing — no sign
of life, no sign of fallen items, no sign of other disturbances. The next
morning, however, he received a call informing him that his old client had
passed away the night before. The cause? A self-inflicted gunshot wound to the
head around the same time Jung was getting back to his hotel room.
This
story reflects a personal superstition Jung had throughout his life: He was a
believer in the paranormal. He thought that two people or two events could be
connected to each other beyond cause and effect and through meaning — that is, say, a husband and
a wife who have loved each other for decades would be capable of sharing a
deep, inner bond beyond actions confined by space and time, almost as if this
meaning existed on a different plane of existence altogether. He
called this synchronicity.
Today,
scientists have diverged away from Jung’s superstitious intuition, and they
attribute synchronicity more to coincidence than they do paranormal forces.
That said, it’s generally accepted that it plays an important role in how we
understand the world we interact with. There might not be a logical connection
between a husband feeling an uneasy pressure in his heart while at the
supermarket and the heart-attack suffered by his wife of 30 years at exactly
the same time elsewhere, but if that’s what he feels, it completely changes how
he understands his life: first, in the realm of stories and meanings, and
subsequently, in the realm of space and time.
These
examples of synchronicity may at first appear detached from the idea of luck,
but at its core, the process of identifying synchronous experiences is the same
as the process of creating luck. When two disparate events are connected in
your mind as having a relation beyond physical cause and effect, you are
creating meaning. When you create meaning, you reconfigure your attention to
see more connections in a random world. When you see more connections in a
random world, you are more likely to notice luck where you might not have
before because your surface area of recognition is greater — your attention is more
attuned to certain surroundings.
There
is nothing lucky about Jung’s old client taking his own life or an old man’s
wife suffering a heart-attack, but the fact that both people made the
connections they did changes how they interact with their loved ones moving
forward — it changes what they
remember, what they expect, what they value, what they are grateful for, what
they are moved by. As long as their feet are planted on the ground in the real
world, assigning the meanings they do to the coincidences in their lives only
adds more beauty, more potentiality, to the depth and the richness of their
experiences.
By
definition, the creation of luck lies beyond intentional action. It’s something
that happens, something that happens randomly yet fits into your life
perfectly. It’s this fitness between randomness and the reality of our lived
experiences that synchronicity helps establish, and it’s this same fitness that
generates meaning and, thus, luck.
Whether
we realize it or not, we all make use of synchronicity in various non-obvious
ways. Some people, naturally, do this more than others. In fact, a small
minority take it so far they ignore the fact that we live in a physical world
dictated by laws that don’t bend to their personal expectations. And that’s a
problem. That said, being intentional about assigning synchronous meanings can
yield gifts that are otherwise hidden, and those who ignore this possibility
also ignore a level of beauty not found in a world of pure causes and pure
effects. There is a certain magic that comes with generating your own luck, and
if approached with humility and awe, this magic can spark up a special sense of
aliveness and vividity.
Personally,
I spend a fair amount of time meeting new people in my life. I enjoy
interesting company, so this is one of the things I value and prioritize. And
yet, sometimes, meeting new people can be exhausting — the novelty wears off, the
next person begins to resemble the last person, and my own
boredom with it all can make even the most fascinating encounter appear
mundane. It’s often the same with email. Because of my writing, I’m fortunate
enough to have a lot of really thoughtful people reach out to me on a daily
basis. These interactions aren’t something I would trade for the world. But,
sometimes, due to the sheer volume, it can start to feel like a task.
Recently,
I have started to ask myself a simple question anytime I find myself falling
into these habit patterns: Why is this person in my life, right now, in this
particular moment? To be sure, I’m not inclined towards believing that some
divine plan has brought them here or that it’s anything more than a
coincidence, but the simple act of treating it like there might be a reason for
it is generally enough to open my eyes wide enough to actually see the person:
who they are, how their life is colliding with my own, and all of the
interesting things I could potentially learn from them.
And
true enough: Because I’m suddenly paying attention to the words coming out of
the other person’s mouth or listening to the actual voice behind the writing in
the email, I notice things that I otherwise would not. Sometimes it’s something
as simple as realizing that a certain book recommendation is exactly what I
need at a particular point in my life, one that I wouldn’t have found without
the stranger emailing it to me, one that perhaps even changes the trajectory of
my life. Other times, it’s seeing that the person who just introduced
themselves to me has qualities that I admire, a few that I even lack, and that
I find that moving and inspiring and that I want to spend more time with them,
time that may even lead to a relationship that, one day, I will look back on,
not able to imagine having been without.
Both
people and events travel along paths, and every time they merge with other
paths, they create new paths. Along these new paths, there are new meanings,
new coincidences, new sources of luck. But new paths don’t always get walked
because we don’t always have the vision to take them. Synchronicity is that
vision, and helped with intention, it’s a vision that creates and generates
worlds — worlds of beauty and
serendipity, life and zest, but most of all, worlds of potential, the potential
for something brighter, something gentler, and perhaps,
something a little more human.
https://medium.com/personal-growth/synchronicity-how-to-create-your-own-luck-1fa377648b72
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