What do you think about synchronicity? What is it? Is it our ability to find patterns and make matches in the seemingly random day–to–day activities? Is it time-bending? Is it divine intervention?
This week there was an exciting line-up of affairs.
Synchronicity often happens in my life; I welcome it like an angel intervention.
Monday, I went to the city for a dinner hosted by a new friend and colleague. It is a new friend that feels more like someone I was destined to meet–well, that is the truth for all of us. I think what I mean is that our kinship feels like soulship. There is a tenable gift that we are tasked to discover together. It's inspiring and mysterious. Our friendship feels mission-led. As we dream together, we circle back to what we most love and desire: generative dialogue and thinking with visionary women who are changing the world in their places.
On the way to dinner, I asked my friend if she had read David Bohm's book 'On Dialogue.' She had not but was excited to read it. That night I thought of buying her the book as a small gift. I thought I would wake up the next day and find it at a local bookstore, then realized the bookstores would not be open before I departed the city, so I opted to buy online and have it mailed to her as quickly as possible as she was leaving the city shortly.
When I pulled up the book on my online account, I saw above the book a note saying: YOU BOUGHT THIS BOOK MAY 12, 2015. I was now looking to order this book again almost to the date eight years later (May 15, 2023). This felt interesting. I don't think I would classify it as synchronicity per se, but it certainly raised my curiosity about time.
We don't know when something that has been seeded long before will begin to bloom.
When I returned to work on Tuesday, I noticed a book in our shared library had been left on the table. A book I've never seen before. The book is titled: The Supreme Art of Dialogue by Anthony Blake. Upon opening it, I see that Mr. Blake has designed complex organizing principles for generative dialogue to stimulate the co-creation of meaning between people. This is aligned with what my colleague and I have been discussing in terms of creating and facilitating the conditions for valuable conversation. His book also aligns with what I researched two weeks ago when investigating the alphabet's origins and fell into a Kabbalist rabbit hole.
This found book on the table Tuesday compounded the mystery of Monday's second purchase of On Dialogue.'
Synchronicity is a mystery that gives us keys or clues for our mysterious life paths.
When I was reading through bits of Kabbalist structures of meaning, I was mesmerized by the knowledge illustrated and assigned in symbolic relationships.
Knowledge is built and dropped in time which we scramble to rediscover.
One of the key takeaways from David Bohm's thinking on dialogue, as a physicist and philosopher, is that truth evolves between us in dialogue, exclusively in real-time and in physical proximity. Perhaps the desire to create space for visionary women to be in conversation is because there is a calling for a forgotten truth to emerge that will only happen in one another's company.
What do you think?
I think it's true. I think our bodies change the shape of the space between us. I think our breath alters the chemistry of the air we inhale. I think what we remember later is filtered through the hazy screens of our sensing organs and mesh strainers of memory. I think the real-time, physical exchange is a thing unto itself because it is not made only of words. I think words are highly overrated. What I love about poetry is that the words are only arrows pointing in the direction of some other thing. Perhaps all of Zoom is a form of poetry and we are mistaking it for linear communication. I know this to be true; as Zoom is an art form like all others. Telephone is to Zoom as cafe chat is to lecture hall as Shakespeare is to Kabuki. We are all in the room together at the same time at all times forever. But most of us are not so at ease with eternity/infinity to know this and also live finite lives composed of hours and days, grocery lists, and medical bills. A body is a container in the shape of a body, but it is porous, and also made mostly of space held loosely together for a bit of time. Truth is a verb; a stone is not always one.