Are you ready for another little synchronicity story? I like to play with synchronicities as if they’re dreams, letting them unfold and tell their own tales:
A couple of weeks ago I received a renewal notice for my driver’s licence, and decided to renew it for the maximum, another five years. It’s one of those things that can’t be done online, so I made a note to go and get it sorted while I had a bit of time up my sleeve. The original expires on my birthday, which is a few days before Christmas, so leaving it until the busyness of the silly season seemed, well, silly. Why not get it done now?
The next morning, I discovered that my watch, a birthday gift five years ago, had stopped at 22.14pm while I was asleep. What had I said about having time up my sleeve? I’d need to take the watch in to a jeweller to renew the battery. It felt weird not having a watch up my sleeve, and weirder still consulting my bare arm far too often in search of the time. Do I really look at my watch that many times a day?
I’m saying yes to another five years of driving and yes to another five years of tick tock time.
So, what happened five years ago, and why is it time to renew and reenergise it now?
The first thing that sprung to mind was that I decided to write a new book five years ago. I announced it just after Christmas and added that I was going to take a different approach this time. All my other books have been written to tight delivery dates (I don’t like the word ‘deadline’), but this time I wanted to take it slow, let it develop, let it write itself, no hurry, no delivery date. And that’s exactly what happened. Along the way I showed various drafts of the developing book to people, followed suggestions and advice, looked for an overseas agent, failed to find the right match, let the book sit to one side for a long time while other things took precedence, then, finally, brushed it up and got a top editor to add her magic and also ‘translate’ it from British English into American English. She began this work in early November, renewing and energising the book for publication at the same time that I was renewing and reenergising my erstwhile exhausted watch batteries and permission to drive.
Perhaps that’s it, one reading of the synchronicity: renewing on all levels, and particularly energising for bringing out a new book, which requires time and drive amongst other things.
Let’s look at that 22.14pm again.
My birthday is on 22nd (of December), and five years ago, when I received the watch, the year was 2014. If you look super closely, you’ll see the date on my watch is 20. The date is never right because it’s far too fiddly for me to adjust, so I don’t. You could read that as 2014, or you might think that’s going a bit far. But the new year coming up is 2020, and it’s definitely time to energise for 2020 and the years that follow.
It was only after I took the photo that I realised that part of my face is reflected in the watch face.
Honouring the synchronicity, I’ve been reflecting on the themes and symbolism, and watching … yes, you got it, watching … to see what happens next.
I don’t remember exactly how old I was when I passed my driving test, but it was sometime in my very early 20s. I might even have been 20. What I do remember – apart from the elation of passing the test first time, which was rare in the mid-1970s, and a feeling that they had made a mistake because I really didn’t feel ready to be let loose on the streets driving a car – was that I received a driving licence for life. It was a British licence, and that’s how it worked back then. ‘Life’, I discovered, looking at my licence, ended on 22 December 2024. After that, my driving skills would need to be reassessed. I kept staring at that date, 2024, unable to comprehend a time so far in the future, let alone next century, let alone imagine how old I would be by then and what would be happening. Now that I’ve renewed my Australian licence for another five years, I have caught up with that magical date. My new licence expires on 22 December 2024. I look forward to renewing it many times in the future.
I have to share a story about the hour before I passed my driving test all those years ago. I had booked an hour with my driving instructor to warm up on the drive in for the test. I met him, in Glasgow’s city centre, on a steep street where the car was parked. I kept repeating to myself, ‘mirror, signal, mirror’, keen to get this right. “Off we go then,” said my driving instructor. I checked my mirror, signalled, pulled out into the traffic, and checked my mirror again. I drove downhill to stop at the red traffic light at the bottom of the hill. I was feeling shaky and nervous but pleased with my progress so far. “It might help,” offered my instructor, “if you turn on the ignition.” Those were the days when you always needed to turn the key to get the car started. These days, with a proximity key, this wouldn’t have happened, but back then it was only the steep downhill slope of the road that gave the car momentum. I was driving without the engine on. Was it all going to be downhill for me from now on, I thought, heading for a failed test result? Luckily for me, my instructor didn’t share my huge mistake with the examiner who took me for my driving test. Was I really ready to drive safely? I’m not so sure! I can look back on my life and see so many charmed events like this one, and, over time, my driving skills naturally improved. As did my writing skills.
I like to treat a synchronicity as a dream, to explore its themes and symbols and see where it leads.
When exploring a dream, it’s important to give space to whatever memories come up, to watch their stories unfold with wise hindsight eyes.
When a number comes up in a dream, one approach is to look back that number of years. So, if 20 comes up, for example, you look back 20 years, or to when you were 20.
When I was 20, I graduated from university. I was excited about the great unknown that lay ahead. Everything in my life felt uncertain. I can look back now and see a path from where I was then to where I am and what I do now, but back then I couldn’t see that path. In the end I had to trust that uncertainty and pull out into the flow of life’s traffic in the best way I could, whether or not I was doing it right, whether or not I had control of my journey or was merely freewheeling downhill.
Looking back 20 years takes me to the weeks leading up to the new millennium, and our global fears and concerns about Y2K. Would our computer systems, our businesses, life as we knew it, continue smoothly or be thrown into massive cataclysmic disruption? Well, it was all smooth and easy, wasn’t it, in retrospect, but uncertainty was certainly the vibe at the time.
We can renew and re-energise our intentions for another five years – and then another and another – but intention requires faith, faith in the ultimate blessings of uncertainty as long as you keep your eyes and your heart wide open.
As it turned out, my watch was ready to pick up on a Monday, and I arrived at the jewellers around lunchtime. I had to wait for five minutes or more while the assistant attended to another customer. By the time he handed me my nicely re-energised ticking watch I noticed that it was exactly 1pm. The date was 11.11, and it was 1 pm. Isn’t there a nice new beginnings kind of ring there with all those ones? And I’ve got time up my sleeve again, time to devote to what’s coming next.
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