When creepily meaningful things happen.

Have things happened to you that are strange? It seems to be a coincidence, but the feeling is, that there is more to it?

This phenomenon is called synchronicity. Here are two of my stories from this realm:

I live in Freiburg in the Black Forest, so of course I go up the mountains in my free time. Our local mountain is called Schauinsland, and there is a 20-minute cable car ride you can take to get up to 1300m.

Last year, I decided to go up. I hadn’t been for a long time, and it was a glorious autumn day. They had put up a new sign displaying the costs. I sensed a mild prick of annoyance because the last time I had been up, I had paid €15, but pensioners (the new sign said) only have to pay €14. (I’ve been a pensioner since April 2024, but have continued working.)

I immediately forgot that.

So there I was, half an hour later in the wonderful Black Forest nature, walking rhythmically along a path, happy and content, when my eyes fell on something glistening in front of me. It was a €1coin. I stopped in my tracks, a smile on my face. I looked around me; there was no one there. Then I stooped and picked up the coin, grinning.

On 12 May this year, I travelled to Prague to join someone I had met via Facebook to commemorate her grandmother with a ‘Stolperstein’. Angela had read my book ‘The Unspeakable’, and we’d become a little more than ‘just’ Facebook friends as we had similar family backgrounds connected with the previous Czechoslovakian state. Her father and my father both left the country as children to escape the Nazis.

The historic centre of Prague is magical, where the old and new co-exist, creating architectural beauty devoid of high-rise buildings. It is, therefore, remarkably atmospheric; it escaped bombing during World War II. If you haven’t yet been, it’s really worth a visit.

At the beginning of this year, I started translating my book ‘The Unspeakable. Breaking my Family’s Silence surrounding the Holocaust’ into German.

The chapter about my father’s sister includes her report of returning to Czechoslovakia and spending time in Prague in 1945. And as synchronicity would have it, that was the next chapter to translate. The chances were remote that exactly this chapter would be the one which I’d would be working on at the same time that I was visiting Prague, 81 years after my aunt had been there after WWII. Here is the excerpt describing her experience when she returned.

Carl Gustav Jung (1875 – 1961) was a Swiss psychiatrist, psychotherapist, and psychologist who founded the school of analytical psychology. He saw synchronicity as chance occurrences from a statistical point of view, but meaningful in that they may seem to validate paranormal ideas. So while I don’t think I have ‘paranormal ideas’, I do believe that a certain level of sensitivity to things that happen to us gives us a sense of coherence – even if we can’t explain things. For me, that is to do with the positive Aspen state that Meryl Streep embodied in the film ‘The House of the Spirits’ based on Isabel Allende’s book.

Have you experienced synchronicity? Let me know!