“Give up waiting as a state of mind. When you catch yourself slipping into waiting…snap out of it. Come into the present moment. Just be and enjoy being.” — Eckhart Tolle
This quote landed in my inbox yesterday afternoon, when I was waiting for something else. I’m not sure what I was waiting for, exactly, but I was fully consumed by the feel of unfulfilled anticipation. My stomach was tense, my shoulders were heavy, and I couldn’t stop myself from checking for email notifications every few minutes.
I had done all the right things yesterday, too. I am experimenting this week with different morning routines to try to maximize my writing output. Yesterday I was up at 5:15, made my coffee, fed the dog, stuffed the anti-seizure pills down his throat, took care of emails, got kids up and off to school, meditated (not very long–I’m still learning), went for a run, and churned out 1,000 words of the book.
I did all the right things, went through all the right motions, but I was still not content. To be honest, and I’ll just come out and say it, it’s hard putting the work out there and being met with silence. They told me this would happen when I started the blog — there would be days, especially at the beginning of the process (and I am definitely still in the very beginning of the process) when you think you put some good stuff out there and nobody comments.
My ego is having a field day with it, but my inner Being, the conscious part of me, recognizes it’s all part of the journey. It’s nobody else’s job to reassure me that I’m on the right path. I know that I am (well, I’m pretty sure that I am, most days anyway).
So when Eckhart Tolle’s present moment reminder arrived in my inbox yesterday telling me to stop waiting and simply enjoy being, I actually laughed out loud. It was a perfect example of synchronicity, which Carl Jung described as a “fortuitous intermeshing of events.”
As Julie Cameron describes it in The Artist’s Way, “Following his own inner leadings brought [Jung] to experience and describe a phenomenon that some of us prefer to ignore: the possibility of an intelligent and responsive universe, acting and reacting in our interests.”
Almost a century after Jung first wrote about the concept, Wikipedia defines synchronicity as “the experience of two or more events that are apparently causally unrelated or unlikely to occur together by chance, yet are experienced as occurring together in a meaningful manner.”
So yes, I am one of those people who believe that everything does happen for a reason. And although I was in a funk yesterday, bogged down by the waiting-for-something monkey on my back, I did manage to remain present enough with the feeling to recognize the lesson. My gift in return was getting a blog post out of it.
If you want to read a terrific piece about synchronicity and learn how to recognize it in your own life, check out Bill Apablasa’s recent post over at theother999rooms by clicking here.
I’d love to hear about your own examples of synchronicity. When has something that started out bad actually turned into something good for you?
