You Just Can't Force These Things

It was one of "those" days.

The synchronistic phenomenon was in full swing: the incidents coming left and right, the world alive with them, as to leave my head spinning in a surreal, living-dream daze. On the day in question, I'd experienced several "reading"-type synchronicities in particular, where my random thoughts and experiences would coincide with equally random phrases read in books or on signs and the like. To my resident skeptic, however, such high levels of "activity" only inspire negative, glass-half-full comments. For example: while I was sitting outside a coffee shop and read "A bell jingled," and no bell jingled in answer.

With that, my mind's resident skeptic spoke up: If you're really experiencing these surreal synchronicities as you think, then why no bell?

Good question, I thought in reply. Absently, I then set the book down to take a sip of coffee. Afterward, upon resuming the book, I picked back up where I'd left off, at "A bell jingled."

Immediately upon reading it this time, I heard a bell sound from behind me -- and not just any bell, but a jingling bell, a Christmas leftover, with holly and mistletoe and all, hung on the coffee-shop door (despite it being August). The door, opened by some random patron exiting the shop, lay at my back, totally out of sight, such that I couldn't have orchestrated its opening and my reading the phrase even subconsciously -- yet the two had coincided perfectly, as is patternistic of this phenomenon (and of the dozen or so similar occurrences that had transpired that day alone).

To this, my inner skeptic had no rebuttal. I sat silently for a moment, then laughed.

But, striking at this was, it wasn't through (whatever "it" is).

A minute later, a couple paragraphs down in my book, the phrase was repeated, exactly: "A bell jingled." And, again, a jingling bell coincided perfectly with my reading the words (albeit from a different door this time).

My skeptic and I shared another telling silence, then I refreshed my laugh.