What's Synchronicity?

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What Picture Comes to Mind With The Word, Synchronicity?

If you have to stop and analyze it – Latin: combining Syn (together)
with Chronos (time), like I do, and still cannot get a handle on it,
read on, it’s a really hot, powerful word.

One of the fathers of psychology, Carl Jung, concocted the term
after he experienced some ‘weird- weirder-weirdest’ stuff in his
psychoanalytic practice.

Synchronicity is reserved for events occurring against-the-odds. Fancy
folks call it a “meaningful-coincidence, mysterious, uncanny, really
squirrely – it’s the Nuts.”

Settlement

I was prepared to try this case in front of the sitting judge. My client
wanted to get it over with and so did I. The lawyers for the bus company
said a big ‘No’ to a settlement, so here we go.

Do I have to tell you lawyers are skeptics, and don’t believe their own
Mother? I had the doctor on-call and expected a quick, two-hour show.
Odds were 75/25 in favor of my client. The question was damages.

The clerk of the court called our case. Instead of starting, he said the
Judge was ill, and needed two hours to recover. Did we want to
adjourn to next month or wait? My question was would it start in
two-hours or drag on?

My decision was to wait and see. The client went to lunch, and I stayed
in the hall and started reading a law book from my attaché case.

Bottom line: I believe in cause-and-effect, coincidences and randomness.
I started reading this law book on negligence settlements. Three cases
in a row were about clients who died in the course (middle) of a trial.
Unusual.

I got an eerie feeling that gave me a chill. I closed the book and walked
inside the courtroom. The lawyer for the defendant, Bus Company
waved to me. I walked over. We talked, and settled the case for $125
thousand. No trial.

My client came back from lunch. Delighted we avoid a trial, and signed the
settlement form. My fee was 30%, so it was a good day’s work.
I delivered the agreement to the other side and smiled a lot.

Next day at the office, her son called. She had ceased-and-desisted. He
wanted the dinero. That’s Synchronicity.

Little Green Men

Let me try again – we live in a culture, society and century that permits
only one underlying order of the universe. It must operate on the principle
of cause-and-effect, and be readable by our five (not six) senses.

Anything else is saying you were abducted by little green men in their
flying saucer. Sure, we luv magic and the mysterious, but it’s for our
Inner-Child, about 11 years old, and it appears on the Sci-Fi channel.

Difference Between Intuition and Synchronicity

Intuition is an insight or revelation, something that just comes to you
without involving thinking. You stumble over it like catching your foot
on the table leg at night. Sounds like synchronicity to me.

I’m at the office when my secretary walks in with a telephone message.
I return the call to my fraternity brother from law school. Buzzy is a
lobbyist in D.C. and just called to keep in touch.

“I got a rich client who is looking for a new business to invest in. You
always hear of weird stuff, so I called.”

“Yeah, but the one I got is in the education industry.”

“There is no such thing as an industry for education, but tell me
about it.”

I did, and he liked the concept of training for SATs, GRE,
and Medical and Law school entrance exams.

“But one thing, my client is a bit strange, he wants an office
And salary for life plus $17 million,” expecting him to laugh.

Here’s the punchline: my client was calling on the other line, so I
excused myself from Buzzy, and took the call.

“H.B., I had a dream last night that you sold my company to
The Washington Post for an outrageous sum.”

“Yeah, how much?”

“17 mil, and an office for life.”

Two things, Buzzy never told me the name of his client, and
I made up the amount of $17 mil on the phone just for fun.”

I told him I would get back to him later.

“Buzzy, what the name of your client?”

“He wouldn’t say until he had an exclusive agreement.

Bottomline: the deal went down like the subway runs
underground. I never told the client or Buzzy because
they would have had me committed.

Now you and I, and Carl Jung know these were cases
of mere randomness and pure coincidence. Forget
that synchronicity stuff and get real.

Endwords

Here one bit of advice: “show up, do the work, and don’t
be concerned about the outcome.” Well, one more.

“Expect the unexpected. Don’t freak out, and go with the
flow.

Thought: I’m at the Foxwoods Casino on a Wednesday
taking a client out, I don’t gamble.

I do study the game of Texas Hold’em Poker, and even write on
the subject. Laugh, but the client sits down to play. I leave
and amble around the crap tables.

A young woman walks up to me and asks me for advice.
I know more about bonobos (dwarf-chimps), than craps.

She’s a school teacher who just got laid off. I watched
her make her numbers 27, yes, really, twenty-seven times
in a row. She made two-dollar bets, and didn’t win much.

I bet on her tossing the dice because she made me tingle.
What I won is between me and the IRS. I gave her $2K.

Speed reading: if you want to raise your intuition, and
double your long-term memory, plus triple your learning
speed, ask me about it. See: www.speedreading101.org

See ya,

Copyright © 2011, H. Bernard Wechsler
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