Synchronicity

It does seem as if interesting things happen in clusters. The last couple of months have been very productive. I have been writing a lot and the more I write, the easier it is for me to write more. Strangely enough, as I pursue my own writing interests, I have been running into people who are writers in the making. These people are complete strangers who start talking to me without any knowledge of my background. Its almost as if I am giving off a “writer” vibe.

You could try to explain this phenomena in several ways. For example, you might say that I am more willing to entertain a conversation with a fellow writer, that I frequent places like cafes and bookstores teeming with writer types, that I make friends with people who are interested in literature and their friends are more likely to be writers. All of these explanations are surely part of the story, but they cannot be the whole. I feel that each time I get interested in something, I randomly run into people who share those interests at a greater rate than before, people who I meet in settings that have nothing to do with the interest per se.

I might be romanticizing purely accidental events, but I wonder if there is such a thing as synchronicity? Is there a form of causality that’s utterly different from our usual interactions with the material world (like pushing and pulling and lifting and moving)? Note that there is nothing supernatural about synchronicity, it just happens to clash with our naively materialistic conception of causality, which we know is a wrong notion — after all, ever since Newton’s account of gravitation, we have known that action at a distance is very much possible.