On Synchronicity & Magic-Making.
On an overcast August day in 2005 my father walked into a small bookstore in the town of Alkmaar, Holland. This trip was an opportunity for my sister and I, then teenagers, to visit the country where he had grown up, attended school, and explored narrow cobblestoned streets on his bicycle. We steeped in the curious language he had once spoken so fluently and thought about the past. This was where our grandparents were born and endured the tragic, frightening period of World War Two as children in an occupied country.
Our knowledge on this topic was always fragmented. My grandmother hadn’t spoken much about the war before she passed. We knew that her parents, Nikolaas and Tonia, had hidden Jewish friends beneath the floorboards of their home in Amersfoort, a Nazi stronghold in Holland. We knew that she and her sisters had witnessed their neighbours’ public executions on the street for doing the same. On the other side of the family, my grandfather had preserved paper evidence of a horrifying existence: his Nazi-stamped pass that allowed him outside during certain hours and food stamps for bread and butter he was never able to use because there was no food.
As my dad now browsed casually through the quiet bookshop, he caught sight of a thick, cellophane-wrapped book called Rechtvaardigen onder de Volkeren: Nederlanders met een YAD VASHEM. He picked it up, mesmerized. The English translation is: Righteous Among the Nations: The Dutch with a Yad Vashem. The Hebrew means “a memorial and a name”, and refers to Dutch who were officially awarded for giving aid to Jews. My dad knew his grandparents had been awarded an honour like this.
Driven by a sudden urge, he looked around the shop furtively, removed the cellophane wrapping, and opened the book. There were lists of names, both Dutch and Jewish. He flipped to the name “Kuijk”, and there they were:
Kuijk, Nikolaas van (1900)
Kuijk-Groenstege, Tonia van (1899)
His grandparents’ names typed in black and white, alongside the names of the people they had hidden, and a short mention of their three young daughters who had lived in the house at the time.
Imagine that. He had brought us there with an underlying desire to reconnect with his history and also his relatives, so far to no avail. My grandmother’s younger sister Wilhelmina still lived in Amersfoort, so he had sent her a tentative email months before but had received no response. And here she was in this book. It was like it was all meant to be. Or maybe not.
Coincidences.
A woman’s fortune cookie announces that she’ll receive money in an unusual fashion and shortly after, her friend decides to pay back his ten-year debt to her.
A retired detective is asked to take on a final murder investigation and learns that the victim shares his birthday.
An entrepreneur gives up on his business, and in his first job interview learns exactly what he needs to solve his main business problem.
My dad walks into a random bookstore in a foreign country, unwraps a compelling-looking volume, and finds his family in its depths.
These coincidences happen to all of us. Sometimes they slap us in the face and sometimes we need to look for them, but they are always there. If you look up the word “coincidence” in the thesaurus, you will find contradicting philosophies – two lenses we use to make sense of our lives and of the larger working cogs of the universe.
The first grouping contains words like “accident”, “chance” and “happenstance”. From this perspective we understand coincidences to be both entertaining and void of meaning. In this space, logic and reason reign – through it, we understand “meaning” to be discoverable, measurable, and definable. If an event happens outside of measurable meaning, then there is no reason to attribute meaning to it.
After all, there are a hundred reasons that a man might choose to pay back his friend today. We share birthdays with a statistically significant number of strangers. No business problem is wholly unsolvable. Walking into a bookstore in a town that was ravaged by war is sure to contain some interesting war information, no?
Meanwhile, the second grouping of “coincidence” synonyms contain words like “destiny”, “fortune”, and “synchronicity”. The broad belief here is that there are forces beyond our mortal beings that impact us in ways we will never fully understand. Through this lens, coincidences act as brief portals into another layer of existence, offering clarity, inspiration, and in many cases, relief, if we choose to accept the invitation. It sounds something like magic.
Accident and destiny exist on opposite sides of the coincidence coin.
When I became aware of this, I grew more interested in the ways that our outcomes are altered by how we choose to receive coincidences.
For example, my dad is not a believer in accidents.
And so he bought the book, tracked down his aunt Willy’s phone number, and called her from a nearby town. She nearly dropped the phone in shock. She had just opened his email and was staring at it, wondering whether it was too late to respond.
It turns out she knew the son of the Jewish family whom her parents had hid beneath the floorboards (he and his sister had been two lucky passengers on the Kindertransport bound for Britain). He didn’t live in Holland now, but he happened to be visiting that weekend. We met him, showed him the bookshop, and all had dinner together.
This is the first installment of a bigger conversation about businesses and branding, but it is about so much more than that. We have deemed January the month of the Magician. We make resolutions in January. We seek transformation. We want to tap into something bigger than us, something that perhaps knows us already and is willing to prompt and prod us along this journey we call life… if we pay attention.
Synchronicity is a Jungian term. According to Dr. Roderick Main*, “synchronicity describes and theorizes coincidences in which, for example, a person’s dream or thought is matched by something that happens in the outer world, without it being possible that either event could have caused the other.” In Main’s opinion, synchronicity is what gives meaning to a chaotic world. It connects us to myth and helps us play a heroic role in our own story. It re-enchants our experience.
This is an invitation to set aside skepticism and calculations, and instead choose to pay attention.
The woman who receives the money owed to her through a lens of synchronicity doesn’t merely pocket it and move on – she receives it with the weight of magic that it deserves. The money came to her from a place of deeper meaning, and therefore her actions in response create more meaning.
The retired detective with a lens of synchronicity doesn’t shrug and continue planning his retirement – he finds himself speechless and spellbound by the fact that he shares a birthday with the victim. He takes the case and it defines his career.
The entrepreneur who receives the answers he needs in a job interview doesn’t shake it off and take the job – he follows the breadcrumbs and goes on to create a business that he never could have imagined or planned. The job interview becomes a pivotal turning point in the story he later tells.
The book, for my dad, became a golden thread of connection to his past and his family with whom he had lost touch. He ended up purchasing several copies for other people who were also seeking the unexplainable. The book was the beginning of a journey, a reason to say hello and to share glasses of wine by a slow Dutch canal, to mull over how strange and wondrous the world is. A chance to whisper strange thank yous, to one another, to the universe.
Receiving events as steeped in magic beyond our understanding usually leads to creating magic beyond our understanding. And this is not a coincidence either.
It is not a coincidence that as BrandPsyche gathers speed and prepares to take off into the world, that Magician is where we begin. It’s a new year, my friends. What magic will you make?
If you liked this article, you may also enjoy another Magician article: Do You Really Have the Power to Transform Yourself? Dive in and explore the dizzying heights and deep wells of transformation that the universe offers.
Subscribe to our newsletter & go down the rabbit hole of archetypes and self-discovery! We offer monthly insights, fancy tid-bits, and twinkling mind benders that will help you uncover layers of self as you work towards your dreams.
*Main, Roderick. Myth, Literature, and the Unconscious. 1st ed. London, England: Routledge, 2013.
Brittany Veenhuysen is a writer and co-founder of BrandPsyche. With a BA in English and a philosophical lens, she uses strategic storytelling to connect entrepreneurial folk with people they love to serve.