DOES COINCIDENCE EXIST?

Underneath the apparent chaos operating in the universe, we are often faced with significant coincidences that lead us to ask what rules the threads of fate. Who is free to say of having thought of a friend, after a long silence, and at that very moment he phoned or we have happened to find them on the street?

Besides the famous Jung’s case of the patient ―the more important theorist on the subject― and the gold scarab, when talking about synchronicities it is often cited what happened to Anthony Hopkins. When, at the beginning of his career, he won a role for the film “The Girl From Petrovka”, the actor ran unsuccessfully through London’s bookstores to find the novel that had inspired the script.

It was impossible to achieve and he gave up and went down to Leicester Square station to go home.  Shall we imagine his surprise when he saw, at the same bank where he was waiting for the tube, that someone had forgotten a novel, “The Girl from Petrovka”. It was a worn copy with notes in the margins.

The second twist of the story came up at the start of the shooting of the film. One day George Feifer, the author of the novel, turned up to see how it was adapted to the big screen. In a lively conversation with Hopkins, the writer asked to see one copy of the book the actor had found on the subway.

To his amazement, it was the personal copy of Feifer and his annotations. He had loaned it to a friend who had had the book stolen from his car, among other things. Which strange paths might have that issue led, one among thousands to have been printed, to reach the actor who needed it? Impossible to know, but the fact is that the random course worked with every sense.

That’s what we call synchronicity, a phenomenon that has some bearing on quantum physics. Two particles can be entangled and, despite being away thousands of light years, anything that happens  to one seems to be immediately transferred to the other. Similarly, seemingly distant events eventually go converging in space and time.

The lesson is clear: everything is interconnected, we all are. And best of all, if we pay attention to the magic of life, it will unfold before us with much more power. There are no coincidences, but yet unknown source causalities that tell us: “Stay tuned, because everything that happens around you counts”.

Álex Rovira and Francesc Miralles