synchronicity
funny, true, Yakima October 12th, 2010Synchronicity is a term that was coined by Carl Jung to describe an ‘acausal connecting principle’, which is the short way of explaining a situation in which two unrelated events have an almost preternatural link, in a way that was unknown at the time of the first event. That sounds confusing, but it’s really a beautiful idea, and I’ve been lucky enough to experience it a handful of times, and here’s my favorite example.
When I was a kid, I used to have a green Huffy bike that was really heavy and cumbersome. Some of the other kids had BMX bikes, and they could race around, pop wheelies, and catch air off of ‘sweet jumps’ with ease. (That’s a Napoleon Dynamite reference, by the way.)
My tank of a bike made such stunts laughably difficult, although they did happen occasionally, albeit with a little help from my friends. One kid named Sean who lived across the street claimed to have bionic powers. This was in the late 1970’s, after all, and the Bionic Man TV show was in full swing. Sean was notorious for claiming the powers whenever he would throw a football for a slightly longer distance than normal, or run extra fast, but his favorite thing was to stand in the middle of his yard and gesture at the two large trees in it. “I can pick up this tree in this hand,” he would say, “and that tree over there in my other hand.”
“Well, let’s see you do that,” my brother and I said.
He would hold his arms out and flex his fingers before he poked at his wrist and said, “Hunh. My bionics don’t seem to be working today.”
“Oh, man, that’s a shame,” we said. “We wanted to see you lift up the trees. Maybe next time.”
That being said, one day all of us were riding our bikes in circles, jumping off curbs and trying to pop wheelies, and after numerous tries, I finally was able to get the front wheel of my Huffy off the ground at the precise moment it needed to be lifted, and the front wheel sailed into the air. I kept it aloft for quite some time, and I was elated. When the wheel found its way back to the ground, I pushed backwards on my pedals, stopped my bike, and shouted with glee. “Hey, everybody, did you see that? Oh, man, that was super high!” Most people cheered and said that yes, they’d seen it, but Sean was having none of it.
“Did you see me go like THIS right before you pulled up on the handlebars?” he asked, making a sort of throwing motion with his arm.
The rest of us kinda looked at each other, and I said, “Uh, no, I didn’t see that.”
“Oh, well, I transferred my bionics to you, and that’s what gave you the strength to do that.”
“Oh, okay,” I said, trying not to laugh. “Thanks!”
After much cajoling of my parents, I finally got a new bike when I was about nine years old. I’d been looking at it for months in a catalog I’d gotten from the Schwinn store. It was a Tornado, and it was love at first sight.
I don’t remember exactly when I got it, whether it was for my birthday or For No Reason, but I loved it, and I rode it everywhere. It was quite an improvement over the clunky Huffy. Suddenly jumps and wheelies were no problem, and I could skid around the slippery sidewalks at CatholicSchool like a pro. A handful of us clipped playing cards into the spokes of our wheels with clothespins, in order to make our bikes sound like hot rods. Incidentally, I think it may be time to clip a card or two into the wheels of my new bike and race around the neighborhood, just to see what kind of a reaction I get.
In true BFS&T fashion, I told you that story so that I can tell you this one, and this is where the synchronicity factors in.
One day, my brother and I were playing football in the front yard, like we did often. On this particular day, we were in full uniform, with pants, jerseys (he wore a Seattle Seahawks jersey, while I was partial to the Pittsburgh Steelers), knee pads, shin guards, shoulder pads, and helmets. We were quite well decked out, I have to say. So we’d been playing for a while that afternoon, when I got the sudden urge to ride my bike. Normally I would have gone inside to change out of my football uniform first, but this time I chose to climb on my Tornado and zoom away in full regalia. I thought I should just leave my helmet and everything on; I’m not sure why.
I had been riding for fifteen or twenty minutes, when the thought occurred to me, Why didn’t I take all this stuff off? I must look like a complete idiot. I’m going home right now and changing. About one second after I had finished that thought and turned toward home, my handlebars slipped ninety degrees sideways, and my bike fell to the ground. I flew through the air for a couple of seconds, flipped over onto my back, and my head slammed down onto the cement sidewalk much harder than it had any right to.
I lay there dazed, looking up at the sky, completely unhurt. I suddenly realized how glad I was that I’d chosen not to change out of my football helmet, and I rode home with newfound vigor. I don’t think I told my mom what happened, because I didn’t want her to worry. Nothing had happened to me, after all, so why bother her with a non-issue? But I never forgot, and I got a bike helmet pretty soon after that incident.
By way of a summary for this entry, here’s a video of the Police, tearing it up in 1984 (I’m guessing it’s 1984 by what they’re wearing), when they were at the absolute top of their game. This, naturally, is the song, “Synchronicity I.”