If you are unfamiliar with synchronicity it was explained by Carl Jung as “meaningful coincidences” if they occur with no causal relationship, yet seem to be meaningfully related.^[1] Synchronicity is not the same as coincidence, as the phrase ‘meaningful coincidence’ gives synchronicity a near mysterious, magical, type of phenomenon.

To give a personal example, I was listening to a radio talk show about synchronicity in relation in quantum physics or something else I didn’t understand and less than a week later I had a synchronistic experience. This would be a coincidence.

What happened was I published a post on my Mariner blog about the DH. As happens when I write about sports, sometimes I can get carried away. I don’t like the DH and I went over the top a bit. A woman castigated me in the comments section. It was vicious, near troll like. Though part of her argument was incorrect her anger made me revisit what I wrote. Looking at some sentences and phrases through new eyes, I realized the writing should have been better. So I revised it, making it more palatable, less histrionic.

I felt bad, not for the personal attack by the woman, but the fact that my point, though I was trying for humor, came off Trumpesque, that being mean spirited without much thought behind what I was saying. I might be too hard on myself, then as now, and I could have left it as written, but I thought the writing was not what it should have been. So I felt awful for being sloppy in making a point.

The next day, still feeling like poodle doodle, there was an email in my inbox from a blog a subscribe to. It was a guest post about “How to Recover from  criticism (and how to eliminate it!). It explained what causes the urges that may have driven the woman to say what she said. And it is also something we can learn from.

The point is that the column came when I needed it, it was meangful, something beyond coincidence, and there was no casual relationship. A Christian would say it was the hand of God, but I will stick with synchronicity.