A Synchronicity Story

What better way to end the year than with an enticing touch of mystery and synchronicity?

It was my birthday last week, and on waking I decided to begin a Synchronicity Journal. I have recorded synchronicities from time to time, but it’s been a while since I’ve dedicated a journal solely to these magical experiences, and they’ve been so abundant recently that I want to honour and reflect upon them.

But let’s begin with a story of manifestation.

As you may know, last month we moved interstate from hot, humid, sub-tropical Brisbane in Queensland, to cool, temperate Hobart in Tasmania, about as far south as you can get in Australia. After 24 years of living in Brisbane, this was a big change. The plan was to look for somewhere to rent for the first two years, somewhere large enough for us both to work from home. Oh, and a long list of other specific requirements, naturally.

We knew that finding what we wanted might be a challenge as the rental market here is extremely tough. Hobart is a popular tourist destination, and many houses that used to be available as rentals are now fitted out as Airbnb accommodation for tourists.

People shook their heads. “Good luck with that,” they said, somewhat mournfully. So we were prepared to do our best and follow the timing of the universe, while living and working from a variety of Airbnbs.

“Why is it that you can magic the card you need, but not a house?” Michael asked me one evening after we finished playing a round of Quiddler (a fantastic word game if you haven’t discovered it yet). I had just admitted that if I focussed I could draw the winning card I needed from the pile. It doesn’t always work, but it works so well most of the time that I actually have to try not to do it, otherwise I feel that I’m cheating.

We had been house hunting for four weeks since our arrival and while some houses had bits and pieces of what we were looking for, the totally right one hadn’t yet turned up. Maybe Michael has a point, I thought. Have I lost my magic touch?

There was a positive side. The whole house-hunting and Airbnb-hopping exercise was proving an opportunity to see a range of properties and suburbs and experience living (and working) in some of them. It was enabling us to extend and refine our search, to get clearer on what we wanted.

“I really fancy having a red front door,” I said to Michael one morning as we were out walking, and mentally added it to my written list.

The outcome of phase one of my story is predictable, so I’ll hurry it along so we can proceed to the further unfolding of the story, the one laced with mystery and synchronicity.

A few days before my birthday we walked into the house that ticked all our boxes, and have now signed the lease. In the end our search took less than five weeks. Yes, of course it has a red front door. More than that, it has two red front doors, each on a different storey. Yes, of course it has everything on my original list, and it is wonderfully located even though we had been beginning to think we would need to live further out of the city to get the kind of house we were looking for.

So now onto the mystery and synchronicity:

When we first visited Hobart, in May this year, I had felt at home the minute we stepped off the plane. We picked up a rental car, drove to our holiday Airbnb, found a nearby supermarket to stock up on food, and had a quick and healthy bite to eat at a little cafe close to the supermarket car park. Evening was drawing in and we really wanted to move beyond organising practicalities and get into holiday mode.

“I was looking at the visitor’s book at the Airbnb,” I said to Michael, “and someone wrote that the highlight of their trip was visiting Battery Point. Let’s go and have a look.”

I hadn’t done any research, and pictured Battery Point as an historic artillery remnant. We drove round and round, our GPS insistently and annoyingly telling us we had reached our destination, when it finally dawned on me that Battery Point was a suburb not a monument. A beautiful suburb of historic interest, and, as it turns out, once the site of a gun emplacement. By now it was beginning to get dark. We decided to head for the river shore, get some sea air, go for a walk, but again we seemed to be driving in circles while being told we had reached our destination.

“Let’s just randomly park the car and walk,” I suggested. So we did, then walked a minute or so and found a little beach and all the fresh and windy air and holiday inspiration we could possibly need.

“I could live here,” I said.

You’ve guessed, haven’t you? Where we parked the car that day was a few houses away from our new home. (And for those of you who don’t know Hobart, it is a small city of 220,000 people spread over a large area, so this was quite a feat.)

Did I manifest our home by saying “I could live here” that long ago, in May, before we had even decided to move from Brisbane? Or was our destination preordained, as declared by our GPS?

Had I lost my magic touch for our first four weeks of house hunting, or did it just take time for the magic to happen and for the house I had imagined to come up? Or was there a grander plan according to which we needed to experience the alternatives and adjust to our new home state before the house became available?

Before we moved here, I needed to choose a suburb for our PO Box. It turns out the PO Box is a few minutes walk from our new home. (The houses we had viewed and considered were spread pretty far and wide from this suburb.)

The real estate agency that leased us the home is directly above the café where we ate our first Hobart meal near the supermarket car park back in May. We only discovered this after we saw the house.

During this time, I was reading a novel (Unsheltered, Barbara Kingsolver) that featured a woman who collaborated with Charles Darwin. Much of the story plays with the theme of science and God, and whether faith and science can co-exist. It turns out that the owner of the house we will be renting is studying theology. But that’s not all. On the day we signed the lease we moved into another Airbnb (we will be moving into our new home in late January) and amongst the very few books on the bookshelf in that house was a copy of Charles Darwin’s “The Illustrated Origin of the Species”.

The last time I read the Origin of the Species was when I was an undergraduate studying zoology at Glasgow University, and it was in my final year there that I visited and fell in love with the Orkney Islands off the north coast of Scotland. When we visited Hobart for the first time earlier this year, I very strongly felt much of the magic and mystery of the Orkneys. Why do I mention this? At this same Airbnb, the coasters on the coffee table were Orkney souvenirs, each picturing different places in Orkney, places I had visited all those decades ago.

There is a full circle going on here somewhere, and I have reached my destination.

I’m not going to interpret the synchronicities in this blog. I want to leave you with the questions, the mysteries, and in doing so I hope to inspire you to join me in keeping a Synchronicity Journal.

I find that synchronicities run in bursts then quieten for a period before returning. They are as important to me as dreams, I revel in them, and fail to write them down. It’s time for a change! Synchronicities can be as simple, for me, as noticing that everyone who emails me in a day has a name beginning with the same letter. This happens so frequently that I often announce it’s a ‘J’ day or an ‘S’ day. I struggled for years to make sense of this, and finally decided the meaning was simply that there is a pattern whether or not we know how to read it.

Back in the early 2000s, when I ran both a public and member’s-only dream forum on my website, I also ran a Synchronicity forum. We accumulated a wonderful resource of synchronicity stories, and I posted many of my own there. When we closed the forums after a few years, a technical hitch resulted in losing all those stories. Maybe I’ll start another, but first up, I’m off to choose my Synchronicity Journal.

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