Meaningful Coincidences

AziMuth

I had great opportunity to introduce a group of fifteen high school seniors to the thought of Carl Jung last week.  Then thirty minutes before the first lecture I became violently ill and had a prolonged encounter with the porcelain altar.  None the less, I proceeded and found some source of energy to get through.  We covered a wide range of ideas, with me always searching for some sense of their level of comprehension, trying to get the idea hooked into some place in their associations.

After the first lecture I did not last much longer at work and had to find my way to bed for the next eighteen hours.  It was in between catnaps while rolling from my left side to my right side when I asked myself “what can I hope to do for these students in two fifty minute lectures?”

As I asked this question my eyes caught site of the clouds out our window, dark and ominous and back lit in the late October afternoon.  There stretching across the sky these two eyes immediately identified the shape of a bottle opener, you know, the type that extends from a Swiss army knife.  I knew I had my answer.  The second day’s lecture led off with this story as a way to introduce Jung’s theory of synchronicity: meaningful coincidences.

…and when I shared how ill I had been they had no idea, one commenting that my energy level was nothing if not electric.  I don’t think I’ve ever been so literally at my best and my worst simultaneously before, but combining the opposites is another topic for another day.