Everything happens for a reason: Why we are fascinated by coincidences

This fall will mark six months since the death of Paul Auster, who had a fixation on games of chance. In fact, he said that a wrong telephone number inspired his famous novel City of Glass. Apparently, he received a call at night in which he was urgently asked about the Pinkerton detective agency. After clarifying that they had made a mistake, there was another call the following night. The American writer and screenwriter gave the same answer, but began to entertain an idea: if the same mistake occurred on the third night, he would say that he was a detective and begin the investigation. That call did not happen, but in the field of fiction it did, giving rise to the first novel of The New York Trilogy.

The lottery of destiny would continue to feature in his books, with novels such as The Music of Chance. In fact, Auster’s fascination with coincidences led him to write about all the ones he had experienced in The Red Notebook. Among the many he compiles, he tells of a friend who spent months trying to locate a certain book that was as exceptional as it was difficult to find. Anxious to read it, he went to dozens of bookstores and searched through catalogs, all without success.

After finally giving up, one afternoon he took a shortcut through the Grand Central train station and went up the stairs that lead to New York’s Vanderbilt Avenue. And it was there, suddenly, that he saw a girl leaning on the railing with a book in her hand: the same one he had spent months desperately looking for. Auster’s friend did not usually talk to strangers, but he was so amazed that he confessed to the young woman that he had been looking for that book for a long time. “It’s great,” she said. “I just finished reading it.” Another coincidence. If it was already unlikely for the book — which was impossible to find in bookstores containing thousands of novels — to appear in the hands of a stranger, the fact that she had just finished reading it at the moment he had discovered her was even more unusual.

The protagonist of this story asked the girl where he could buy the book, emphasizing that it meant a lot to him. She gave it to him, but Auster’s friend initially resisted accepting it, telling the girl that it was hers. “It was mine,” she replied, “but I’ve already finished it, and I’ve come here today to give it to you.” In the resolution of this tale, perhaps the reader recreated the situation to give it an enigmatic ending, but that does not take away the magic of this coincidence. Among the millions of books that exist, what was the probability that the girl on the stairs had finished reading the exact novel that the other was looking for?

We tend to think in terms of cause and effect, but in cases like this, there’s no rational cause to explain what happened. Is it chance? Coincidence? A causality of hidden origin? The Swiss psychiatrist, psychologist and essayist Carl Gustav Jung called it synchronicity, which he defined as the simultaneity of two events linked by meaning, but in a non-causal way.

Everyone experiences these meaningful coincidences on a daily basis. You think of an old friend for the first time in a long time, and just then they get in touch with you. Or an even more common synchronicity: you think of a song and the person in front of you starts humming it.

For Jung — who published the book Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle — at the end of his life, there is an undiscovered causality beneath many of these coincidences. Perhaps they fascinate us precisely because they point to a hidden order within our chaotic world. Although a large part of the population has stopped believing in a higher power, we like to think that everything happens for a reason, that in the end what we experience has meaning. It is man’s search for meaning, like the work of the Austrian psychiatrist Viktor Frankl. From this point of view, synchronicities are clues that reveal the secret course of our lives. And the more alert we are to them, the more we will find.

Returning to Paul Auster, in his book I Thought My Father Was God, he selected true stories that listeners sent to a public radio program he hosted. Many of them deal with this kind of occurrence. One man in Oregon claimed that every time he saw a tire rolling down the road, which happened several times, he had a job opportunity.

We may think it’s just chance, but Carl Gustav Jung suggested that, like dreams, synchronicities guide us on decisions we need to make or prepare us for a change that is about to happen.

Jung's Birds

— In his book on synchronicity, the Swiss psychiatrist describes it as “the simultaneous occurrence of a certain psychic state with one or more external events which appear as meaningful parallels to the momentary subjective state.”

— As an example, he writes that the wife of a patient told him that when her mother and died grandmother, she had observed the same phenomenon: a flock of birds had gathered at the windows of the mortuary chamber, as if they were there to say goodbye to the deceased.

— Some time later, Jung’s patient, who was in his fifties, went to have some heart tests done after noticing some discomfort. The specialist found no cause for alarm. However, the patient collapsed as soon as he left the office and was brought home in a critical state.

— His wife was anxiously waiting for him because shortly after he left for the doctor, a flock of birds had alighted on their house.

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