Jung Called it Synchronicity, but Maybe I'm Just Suiting My Own Needs

Right. so. All I have to do now is figure out how I do this thing I want to do.

Do you ever have on of those realizations where you find yourself, quite unexpectedly, caught in the crosshairs of every choice you've ever made? For better or worse, you have one of those great cumulative moments at the apex of Life Thus Far?

In his signature way of inserting self-conscious commentary into his own narratives, Kundera describes his stories like spiderwebs, strings that pinwheel out into the big picture and meet at the core. When you tell a story you aren't inching along a straight line, you're following those strings back to their center, one at a time until you've traced the entire web, or most of it.

Isn't it funny how people perceive Death as a conclusion? As if all points in a human's life are only plot devices building to that final moment of resignation. As if every street taken and every choice was ultimately to resolve life as one violent end, or one quiet end, or one pitiful end, or one abrupt end.

If I walk out of this building right now and get squashed by a falling scaffold (as one neurosurgeon was crushed in that exact place three years ago), is that what my life meant? How I die is no summary of me. In a way, this is a malignant feature of linear narratives. If life imitates art, then we have accepted that each day overrides the last, and that the final day overrides all other days.

Life is in the web, I think. This is more and more how I see time. When I die I want people to dissect me downwards from the future to the past, so that I die young and tinted orange like a photograph from 1986.

And believing as I do in a vaguely greater order of things, I've followed my instincts down their natural paths. I've been disappointed, I mean existentially disappointed when my efforts seem fruitless. How am I supposed to think, to behave, when the things that felt right turned out not to be?

But I realized lately, all things considered, even my failures were right. Everything I've tried, every person I erroneously thought myself to be, informs who I am now. I don't mean this in a sentimental way, I mean that this was...part of the web. The only way I can describe it is by using a bad movie reference, so forgive me, but it's like Signs. I'm looking around and suddenly glasses of water are everywhere.

Things I did with little thought are suddenly so serendipitous. That renews my faith in magic...just a little bit.