Synchronicity: the opportunity that knocks at our door.

Between the credulity that believes everything and the rationalism that denies everything, a third way: to wed instinct and intelligence.

ESSAY · 11 MIN READ

You have surely, at some point, thought of someone you had not seen in years, and the telephone rang within the hour. A rare word, met in the morning, came back three times before noon. You were hesitating over a decision, and a stranger in a queue spoke the very sentence you had been missing. We have all known those moments when reality seems to wink at us, when chance takes on the air of a message addressed to us alone.

Faced with them, two attitudes stand opposed, and both are crippling. The one surrenders to instinct without restraint and concludes at once: “it is a sign, the universe is speaking to me.” The other trusts only what reason can prove and rules: “mere chance, let us see nothing in it.” The credulous follows his instinct with eyes shut; the skeptic gags his own and refuses to look at what may, perhaps, have deserved a glance. Yet the error is the same on both sides: to have believed that a single faculty would suffice.

For we possess, to face what surpasses us, two powers and not one. Intelligence, which analyses, dissects, verifies, and is wary with good reason. And instinct — what de Gaulle, in The Edge of the Sword, called the leader's flair — which grasps the whole at a stroke, there where the light fails. All wisdom, before a coincidence, lies in wedding the two rather than sacrificing one to the other. I shall not claim to settle what these coincidences truly are, for no one can; I wish to speak of the two faculties by which we may receive their meaning without losing ourselves in them.

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Instinct alone goes astray

Let us begin by doing the skeptic justice, for he is the first to be right. Left to itself, instinct is an extraordinary machine for finding patterns: it sees faces in the clouds, intentions in the wind, designs in the sequence of events; psychologists call apophenia this tendency to link what has no link at all. We are built this way: to spot a predator behind the tall grass long mattered more than to ignore it, even at the price of a thousand false alarms.

To this is added a simple matter of numbers. The mathematician Littlewood observed that an ordinary life should meet a “miracle” — an event with odds of one in a million — about once a month, by the sheer play of the multitude of instants we pass through. The astonishing coincidence is therefore not the exception; it is statistically expected. And our memory completes the work, keeping vivid the time we thought of a friend just before his call, and forgetting the thousand times nothing followed.

Let us say it plainly: most of our coincidences are only that — coincidences. Instinct that reads them without the check of intelligence condemns itself to see signs everywhere, and to become, little by little, nothing but the plaything of its own projections. This is why reason is indispensable. But it suffices no more than instinct does.

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And yet instinct grasps what reason misses

For intelligence, in its turn, has its limits, and the greatest minds have known it. By dint of analysing, of breaking down, of reducing everything to cause and proof, it sometimes misses the living real — singular, moving, which will not be set into equations. This is the lesson that de Gaulle, following Bergson, placed at the heart of command: intelligence sheds light, but it is instinct that decides in the dark, when one must grasp in a single movement a situation that no reasoning exhausts. The true leader is neither the pure calculator nor the pure impulsive; he is the one who, having weighed everything, senses what the figures do not say.

Such instinct has nothing of the first comer's impulse. It is a cultivated flair, nourished by experience and attention, a memory grown so fine that it warns before words. And it is this that picks out, among a thousand lukewarm coincidences, the one that seizes us, makes us shiver, arrives at the very moment its meaning runs us through. It is not improbability that marks it — calculation, here, does not say everything — it is its aptness, that way of answering a question we were already carrying.

A mind as little credulous as Carl Jung's sought to name this disquiet: he coined the word synchronicity, spoke of “an acausal connecting principle,” and elaborated the idea with the physicist Wolfgang Pauli. The hypothesis has never been demonstrated and likely never will be; but that a clinician of such rigour and a Nobel laureate in physics took it seriously forbids us to wave it away. Honest intelligence, here, admits that it does not hold everything.

Intelligence sheds light, but it is instinct that decides in the dark.

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Neither oracle nor chance: a question that knocks

How, then, are we to receive these moments, if we refuse both to read an oracle in them and to take them for nothing? I offer an image. A synchronicity is not a message to decipher; it is a question that knocks at the door.

Consider it. When someone knocks at your door, you do not know who stands behind it. It is instinct that makes you prick up your ears and moves you to open: it has sensed that this, perhaps, matters. And it is intelligence that, once the door is open, asks without mincing words: who are you? what do you really want? Wisdom holds both gestures together. You would be foolish not to open, out of mistrust; more foolish still to lend the visitor, in advance, a name, a message, a will he may not have. Open, then look: first the impulse, then the scrutiny.

The whole trap of the credulous is to believe that the coincidence carries a message already written, that it would suffice to read — “the universe wants me to leave this job.” But the coincidence has written nothing; it has knocked. It does not decide, it draws attention; it does not command, it invites us to look at what, perhaps, we were avoiding. Meaning, if there is any, is not received ready-made: instinct senses it, intelligence tests it, and it is from their accord that it is born — freely, lucidly, under our sole responsibility.

Open, then look: first the impulse, then the scrutiny.

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One encounter, and behind it a whole life

I would not speak of all this with such assurance had I not first lived it. Forgive me, then, a detour through my own story, for it says better than any argument what a coincidence can open.

Many years ago, I met a man, Ali, whom nothing destined me to cross paths with. I had not sought that encounter; it carried no message and announced no destiny. It simply knocked at my door, and I opened. From our nascent friendship there came, little by little, a life I had not suspected: that of consulting, a profession I did not know, that I had never envisaged, and that would nonetheless become mine for decades. Had I been told, the day before that meeting, where it would lead me, I would not have believed it.

The story does not end there, and it is here that it moves me most. In the prolongation of that same friendship, I found myself organising a group journey to Morocco, where I served as guide. It was on that trip — itself born of my meeting with Ali — that I crossed paths with the woman who would become my wife, thirty-two years ago now. A friendship, a profession, a love, an entire life: all of it rests, at its root, upon a single door at which someone knocked one day, and that I had the grace — or the simple presence of mind — to open.

And yet I will take care not to say that this “had” to happen, that the heavens had written it, that all was sealed in advance. I know nothing of the sort, and to believe it would betray everything I have just argued. What I do know is more modest, and surer: the coincidence decided nothing in my place. It opened a possibility; it was I who said yes to that friendship, yes to that journey, yes to that woman. Chance knocked; the life, I had to build. Take away either of the two terms and nothing remains: neither a destiny without my freedom, nor my freedom without that unforeseen call. The coincidence does not make our life; it offers us the occasion, and leaves us alone, afterward, before the choice of how to answer.

Look at your own life, and you will no doubt find a like turning: a post obtained because a train was late, a vocation born of a book opened by mistake, a decisive friendship struck up in a waiting room. We call it luck when we are modest, destiny when we are lyrical. I prefer to see in it a door, and the question it puts to us under its breath: were we, that day, present enough to hear it, and free enough to open it?

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To recognize, one must be ready

This question deserves a pause, for it touches the heart of the matter. A coincidence may well knock: still, to recognize it, one must be available. And this availability has nothing intellectual about it; it is neither decided nor reasoned, it rests on a deeper inner state, almost bodily, made of calm and openness.

I felt it on meeting the woman who would become my wife. It was not a deduction, nor a reckoning of suitability; it was a recognition. As if, without knowing her, I already recognized her. It came from far within me, from a region the mind does not light, and it was accompanied by a singular peace — not the feverish excitement of one who thinks he has hit the jackpot, but a very gentle release, a quiet certainty in which one simply says: this is it. Instinct, there, spoke clearly.

Still, intelligence had to keep from drowning it in its noise. For calm is not only the ground of instinct; it is the place where the two faculties at last agree. Two states must be told apart, states that nothing resembles. There is the feverish certainty of one who hunts for signs, seizes them greedily, and plasters meaning everywhere to reassure himself: that one is not instinct, but fear disguised as instinct, and it almost always misleads. And there is calm recognition, which seizes nothing and receives everything, where cultivated flair surfaces without the veil of fear or desire, and where intelligence, at peace, can listen to it instead of smothering it. The first fabricates; the second discerns. It is not the intensity of the thrill that deserves our trust, but that peace in which instinct and reason cease to fight.

Make no mistake, however: even recognized in calm, the coincidence remains a door, not a verdict. To be ready is not to know in advance; it is to hold oneself still enough within that instinct may speak true and intelligence may hear it — so that, if something true presents itself, nothing in us smothers it.

It is not the intensity of the thrill that deserves our trust, but the peace in which instinct and reason cease to fight.

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What a coincidence reveals is first ourselves

Not all coincidences, though, open onto the unknown as that one did. Often, on the contrary, they reveal not the universe, but ourselves. If one of them seizes you, it is because it falls upon a point already alive in you — a question you turn over in secret, a decision you keep postponing, a desire you dare not admit. Chance has only laid a finger on it; and it is instinct that sensed it before reason could name it.

In this sense, synchronicity rejoins the intuition I spoke of elsewhere: it says, before words, what already occupies us. The traveller who happens upon the image of a distant land and reads in it a call receives no order from the heavens; he discovers the breadth of a desire he had hidden from himself. The coincidence is the mirror, not the source. And that is quite enough to deserve our attention, for we know ourselves poorly, and all that lights our own depths is precious.

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Holding the door with both hands

You will have sensed it: this view of synchronicity continues those I held on discernment, on intuition, on nonverbal intelligence. Always the same conviction, at bottom — that the sound mind is neither the pure calculator nor the pure sensitive, but the one who weds flair and reflection. Instinct without intelligence loses itself in its projections; intelligence without instinct passes the living by. Neither of the two suffices; together, they see.

To live attentive to coincidences, then, is not to watch for the messages of a chattering sky, nor to deny them on principle. It is to hold one's door with both hands: instinct that pushes it open, quick to recognize what resonates; intelligence that holds it back, lucid enough not to be fooled by the first comer. Open enough not to miss what, one evening, will truly knock; guarded enough not to yield to every shadow.

Chance owes us nothing and promises us nothing. But it happens that we meet it at the right moment, there where a question was already waiting for us — as mine was waiting for me, one day, behind the face of a stranger who became my friend. So let us not explain too quickly, and let us not close too hard. Let us feel, let us weigh, and let us remain free in what we make of it.

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