Below is Part 3 in our Synchronicity Lessons series on how to find awe and utilize the power of synchronicities in everyday life — written by Anne Heleen Bijl, board member of The Coincidence Project and leadership consultant.

If a meaningful coincidence happens, many people tend to ignore it because it does not fit with their concept of the world. It should not be possible.

But synchronicity does not ask for proof. It asks for attention.

The choice is up to us as individuals to discover a meaning in it and to do something with it or not. I would like to encourage everyone to expect the unexpected and utilize it like the symbolic language in dreams.

Often I remark that synchronicity is a signal, it announces the start of something special for a longer period.

I discovered this most profoundly when my father died 42 years ago.

He had been ill for two weeks. On August 14, I sat beside his bed in the fading evening light, listening to the silence between his breaths. At exactly 8:02 p.m., he passed.

And in that same instant, outside the window, a large heron appeared.

It circled slowly through the garden.

I stared, startled. I had never seen a heron there before. There was no pond, no stream, no reason for such a bird to be in that place. Yet there it was—gliding past the window as if it had arrived on cue.

The next evening, at two minutes past eight, I sat in the same room.

The heron returned.

A few days later, I followed my father’s hearse to the funeral. The car crossed a railway, and we had to wait behind the railway barriers. As we stopped, a long-winged heron bird descended from the sky and began circling just above the hearse that had stopped on the other side. Then it drifted back and made circles over our car, as though escorting and connecting us on the final journey.

It is difficult to explain moments like these to anyone determined to remain inside logic.

But something opened in me then – an unexpected sense that death had not sealed a door, but cracked one open. I knew we stay always strongly connected.

Since that day, every year on August 14, just before eight o’clock, I step away from everything and go for a solitary walk wherever I am, and I wait.

And far more often than not, a heron comes, even in the midst of cities.

What I have learned is this: to feel connected to the mysterious currents moving beneath life, we must allow ourselves to expect the unexpected. We must become available to it. Intuition rarely arrives with logic attached. Synchronicity rarely announces itself in ways the rational mind can comfortably file away. Yet when we honor these impulses—when we follow what feels quietly
right even when it makes no immediate sense, we are often led toward new understanding, new perspective, even breakthrough.
The unexpected is not always interruption.

Sometimes it is an invitation.

———
Photo by Bob Brewer on Unsplash