Synchronicity is a concept which we return to on many occasions. The reason for this is that we notice a convergence of occurrences which seem to form an arrow pointing to a truth which we need to pay attention to.
In this instance, my eye settled on a self-quote from the book Justin and I recently submitted to publishers: Complete Clarity. The quote is: I have found my peace from the chapter titled, The gaining of wisdom. I wrote that statement – one of deep importance to me – as I created my personal manifesto, which has become my guide for intentional living. When I realised that I was not going to arrive at some ultimate destination which equated in my mind to ‘happiness’, (but that if I lived my intentional life, I would experience many mini arrivals), I could stop striving and feel peace. Inner calm.
The synchronicity came from a second occurrence in which my brother made a book recommendation. I have written about this brother in an earlier blog, Healing Relationships. In that blog I wrote about my desire to reconcile any known outstanding rifts in my life, so that I could, at this senior stage of my life, atone and clear my ‘debts’. (The sweet outcome of this reconciliation is I now have a functioning and growing relationship with my brother). He recommended Ryan Holiday’s Stillness is the Key. I have recently (blog 84) extolled Holiday’s Courage is Calling but had not read this earlier book. When I dipped in, I found these descriptions, among many, of ‘stillness’:
“Anyone who has walked out alone on a quiet street at night as the snow fell, and watched as the light fell softly on that snow and is warmed by the contemplation of being alive – that is stillness.
…Staring at the blank page in front of us and watching as the words pour out in perfect prose, at a loss for where they came from; standing on fine white sand, looking out at the ocean, or really any part of nature, and feeling like part of something bigger than oneself…”
These moments of stillness are relatable to all of us, I am sure. They are also strike me as like the sense of ‘peace’ that I have found when living my manifesto life.
It is noteworthy too, that Holiday suggests we all have this capacity for stillness, that it is innate. He attests too, that all religions, whether they be Christian, Protestant, Buddhist and so on, all have a belief in the importance of stillness, its sacredness.
What is profoundly significant for me, is knowing that I have found my place of stillness. It is through living my purposeful life, the one captured in my personal manifesto, that I – who in our book gives herself permission to construct [her] meaning – feel at peace. I now have the validation that my personal meaning is part of, even one and the same as, this essential and archetypal stillness.
In connecting these two synchronous occurrences, I experienced another moment of stillness/peace. Knowing this ‘place’ is available to me, that it is part of a universal ‘pool’, and I have a guide to living which takes me there, feels like a blessed returning home.
And in a sense, it is.