Lent 2026: day 16 – synchronicity and coincidence

These two related concepts should be seen in the context of the unfolding – the personal unfolding – of your Cosmos as you see it, as it befalls you. Coincidence and synchronicity are also very much connected to mindfulness. 

'Coincidence' comes from the Latin coincidere, meaning 'to fall together'. 'Synchronicity', in the Jungian sense, refers to coincidences that seem to be meaningfully related – supposedly the result of "universal forces.

We notice coincidences around us, some of us noticing more coincidences than others. But making sense of them? We should see coincidences as warnings, as harbingers, signals to be heeded. 

I remember, decades ago, walking past West Ealing station and seeing a woman wearing a black eye-patch. Later that day, I saw another woman on the Central Line also wearing a black eye-patch. One such sighting is unusual. But seeing two in a day – is it a sign? Let's imagine that I didn't consciously note this to myself at the time. And then two days later, I scratch my eye deeply on a low-hanging branch of a rosebush and end up in hospital. As I wait to be seen, I now remember those two women with eye-patches. I had ignored the warning...

Or is this seeing too much into it? 

Being aware of the possibility of things going wrong is an important part of guarding against ill-fate, forestalling or precluding misfortunes of all kinds. As you walk your daily life along the edge of chaos. Seeing two magpies does not mean sorrow – it means it's time to reflect on the possibility of things going wrong and leading to a sorrowful outcome. But just being aware of that is enough to lift that cloud. But if you  understand this, I believe that you can use synchronicities or observed coincidences to ward off bad luck – random events that have a negative outcome on your life., 

To do so, you need to do two things:

1) Accept that coincidences do can contain meaning. This means stepping above the materialist reductionist mindset that would dismiss synchronicities as meaningless. 

2) Act consciously upon observed coincidences. If you consciously observe two people on crutches within a short space of time, it doesn't mean you will have an accident that results in you walking on crutches; rather it is a suggestion offered to you to be aware of the possibility of an accident occurring to you. And a prompt to switch on heightened levels of mindfulness.

There is a balance, between obsessively over-reacting to every possible manifestation of coincidence - and just outright ignoring this phenomenon. Seeking coincidences where there are none is as dangerous as dismissing coincidences that you do become conscious of. So don't go out of your way to look for coincidences; but when you do notice them – don't ignore them!"

The effect is weak but noticeable over the long term. But it will grow in strength as we evolve spiritually. Consciously observed coincidences can be a powerful set of signals to point daily life in the right direction.

"Everything is connected in Time" by ChatGPT

Just as there is the mycelial network of fungus under a forest floor connecting colonies of mushrooms, there is a similar unseen network of coincidence that holds events together.

Lent 2025: day 16
Intuition, the secret power of your consciousness

Lent 2024: day 16
Do we tend to get more spiritual as we get older?

Lent 2023: day 16
Intuition – is it magical?

Lent 2022: day 16
The difficulties of focusing on the spiritual

Lent 2021: day 16
This planet is my home, today and tomorrow

Lent 2020: day 16
My metaphysical journey, as I see it

Lent 2026: day 13 – mindfulness and meditation

Are meditation and mindfulness the same? Both are spiritual practices engaged in by many secular people – indeed, by atheists even. And yet both verge on the metaphysical in terms of how they engage consciousness

Though often associated with each other, they are different. In today's post, I present how I see the difference between meditating and being mindful.

Let's start with definitions: mindfulness is easy; it means the state of being full of mind. Being alert, heedful, attentive; being aware of consequences; being in the flow, latching on to intuition, having presence of mind. Paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally. Mindfulness is being aware of being aware ('metacognition'); it is the cognitive skill of sustaining that metacognitive awareness towards the contents of one's own mind and bodily sensations in the present moment. This involves monitoring and regulating one's attention. Mindful awareness can be focused on internal phenomena such as thoughts and emotions, as well as external phenomena, such as speech or movement. 

Meditation requires more explanation, so before the definitions, the etymology. The word comes from the Latin meditatus (to meditate, to think over, consider), from the Proto-Indo-European med- (to measure, limit, consider, advise). Meditation is defined as "A devotional exercise of contemplation, or achieving an altered state of consciousness, such as vacancy of mind, through relaxed or focused mental activity of a non-substance-induced nature". 

The two are different, and which you are more likely to practice boils down, I think, a great deal to personality. Meditation requires more discipline; allocating time for it – at the expense of any other activity – is tough. People on the ADHD spectrum find it harder to meditate; staying focused is difficult. But mindfulness requires the occasional nudge to get back on track.

I have prompted Google Gemini and ChatGPT to come up with illustrations that highlight the difference between the two. First Gemini (to whom I'd say: "Don't pick the flowers! Let them live and bring joy to others!)

And then ChatGPT (to whom I'd say: "Don't waste money on takeaway coffee!").

Interesting how both AIs have gone for the same visual comparisons.

I see mindfulness as being consciousness at the interface with matter. Will I catch that train? Yes, if I don't lose track of the time. Will I catch flu when in town tomorrow? No, not if I'm aware of people around me coughing and sneezing and keep a healthy distance from them. Will I have a car crash? No, not if I drive with total situational awareness for the entire duration of my drive. 

Mindfulness should be taught to children before they hit adolescence, when normal thinking gets switched off by hormonal rush. My mother taught me the saying quidquid agis, prudenter agas, et respice finem as a child; it was only in middle age that I really got the importance of this piece of wisdom. Essentially, it says, whatever you do, do it mindfully. 

Mindfulness – whether it's when stepping off a bus or knowing that you have switched off the iron before leaving home – should be ever-present at our interface between the material world and consciousness. In a way, the point of the cross where the spiritual crosses the material.

Meditation – on the other hand, is purposefully cutting the inner world of consciousness and the mind off from the noisy, distracting material world. Meditation is about calming oneself into a trance and entering the Flow from within an altered state.

I try to be mindful of the need to be mindful (metamindfulness) as often as I can!

Lent 2025: day 13
You, your consciousness and Time

Lent 2024: day 13 
Aesthetics, metaphysics and ethics

Lent 2023, day 13
High Church and Low: Religious Styles and Personality

Lent 2022: day 13
Comfort and Luxury, Consciousness and Ego

Lent 2021: day 13
Comfort and Luxury – knowing when to stop

Lent 2020: Day 13
Holy buildings and the sense of the mystical

Consciously, mindfully, averting misfortune

An early morning insight, between sleep and wakefulness: {{ We can preclude catastrophe; we merely need to consider the catastrophe and discount the possibility of it happening. That conscious act collapses the wave function* }} 

This is the notion of quantum luck. Misfortune often strikes unexpectedly. Rule it out by expecting it, by thinking about it, considering it... and at that moment the wave function collapses. [The many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics postulates a multiverse in which an infinite number of universes co-exist, each sparked by collapsing wave function. So there is a universe in which you leave home consciously considering the possibility of your house being burgled – and you return home to find that it has been burgled. But not in this universe.]

The obverse is quantum luck is indifference to fate, to random misfortune. The obverse to quantum luck is also complacency; the thinking-by-default that if I were lucky yesterday, I'll be lucky today and I'll be lucky tomorrow. No. You will only be lucky today and tomorrow if you are grateful that you were lucky yesterday. You have to consciously feel that gratitude for this to work. Being mindful, aware, grateful.

You live in a world shaped by priors, things that have already been established, over which you have no control. Accident of birth is the most significant prior. But a whole series of unfoldings is constantly unfolding, possibilities that turn into realities. Fate, random events... 

You are studying for an exam. By chance you come across a fascinating article that explains some question that has been bothering you for some time. You set out this thinking in your exam essay – and it lands you a higher score, which gets you into a better university, where you meet the love of your life... Or not. Once the possibility has crystallised into reality, it becomes a prior from which further events unfold. Good and bad. You can't change the past, but you can influence the future. By action, obviously. But also by conscious consideration. Guided by a desire for good, rather than by ego.

The doomsday scenarios that we guard against. A supervolcano eruption. An asteroid strike. A devastating pandemic. A coronal mass ejection of the sun that knocks out all electricity on earth. Somewhere, on our planet, someone is considering each of these possibilities, and is thus guarding us against them. Last week's 8.8-magnitude earthquake off the coast of Kamchatka was the sixth-most powerful ever recorded and yet the death toll was zero. Good preparation (mass evacuations following tsunami warnings? Mitigation through better civil engineering)? Or – as news came over the airwaves of earthquake, could it have been the conscious hopes of millions of people around the world?

Mystical Judaism has the ideal that there are 36 righteous people (the lamed vovniks) who between them sustain the world. Mindfully watching out for all us sinners. Are there just 36 of them? Did God make the world in six days? I feel that yes, there are conscious folk out there watching for us at macro level just as I am consciously aware of averting misfortune at the personal level. 

Religion is a story we tell ourselves. Science is a story we tell ourselves. Which do you believe? Or do we each weave our own narratives to explain reality? Can God be boiled down to a physical formula? Can science explain the soul?

* I asked Google Gemini to explain the collapse of the wave function in quantum mechanics in simple terms: "Imagine you have a spinning coin in the air. Before it lands, it's neither 'heads' nor 'tails'; it's in a fuzzy state of being both at once. This fuzzy state is like the 'wave function' in quantum mechanics. It contains all the possible outcomes, each with a certain probability. The 'collapse of the wave function' is what happens when you catch the coin and look at it. The act of observation forces the coin to 'decide' on a single outcome – it becomes either definitely heads or definitely tails. All the other possibilities vanish instantly. In quantum mechanics, this is a central idea: until we measure or observe a particle, it exists in a superposition of all its possible states. The moment we measure it, its wave function 'collapses', and it settles into just one of those states."

This time last year:
Warsaw's progress to normality

This time four years ago:
Summer winding down

This time eight years ago:
My Mazovian roots

This time nine years ago:
My father revisits his battleground

This time 11 years ago:
Over the hill at Harrow

This time 12 years ago:
Behold and See - the Miracle of Lublin - Pt 1.

This time 14 years ago:
Quiet afternoon in the bazaar

This time 15 years ago:
The politics of the symbol

Slow progress, but the healing goes on

It's been a week since I badly twanged my right calf muscle, and while I am on the mend, it's still a long way from walking normally and without pain. Another week?

The good news – I have not lost any sleep over this. Every night over the past week has been comfortable; once lying down, I soon forget which leg was injured. But when I get out of bed to stand up, the pain begins. But then as soon as I take a seat, the pain eases. It's just getting about that's problematic. Work has been exclusively from home all this week, with only one live event having to be substituted for a teleconference.

But my mobility is getting better with each day that passes. Above all, I must return to symmetrical walking with a normal gait. By Tuesday morning, I could stand up with my weight equally distributed on both legs. At the moment, it's a bit of a shuffle, with my left leg now being able to swing forward to the point where the left toe is about eight or nine inches ahead of the right toe. It needs to be two feet ahead. Symmetry in movement, as my old dad used to say, is crucial to good health.

Things took a setback on Thursday when I ventured into the back of the garden to empty the compost bin. On the way, my right foot slipped on a wet clump of soil, an immediate stab of pain, and I fell backward, unable to stop the fall. So that day I didn't venture out to do some gentle walking exercise. I did today (almost 4,000 paces) and yesterday (almost 2,000 paces), but there's some way still to go before I can complete 12,000 paces in under two hours.

I am continuing to do those exercises that can still be done without the use of leg power, so press-ups, plank, weights and pull-ups continue. No squatting, no sit-ups, no back extensions. As it is, even before tearing my right calf muscle on December 7, I had already beaten last year's records across all of those exercises, only the paces still to beat. But now that looks unlikely.

The key is to finely balance overdoing it and resting myself into atrophy. As always, body feedback and intuition is all important; listening to what my body is really telling me. And the all important lesson that I should have learnt after an analogous event in the other leg – never break into a sprint immediately after getting up from a long spell in the seated position (bus or car). Running at my age requires a warm-up first. Having said that, I remember my grandmother running for a tram at the age of 73, so there's hope.

The healing process is miraculous. Every successive day is one day's progress along the road to recovery. Standing up to walk over to the sink with an empty mug is not the effort it was five days ago; one should be aware of every intimation of progress and be thankful for it; gratitude; alignment with Cosmic Purpose, and the battle against complacency.

Mind over matter; will yourself better.

This time last year:
A mind-blowing dream

This time two years ago:
Utter, utter gorgeousness

This time three years ago:
Hoar frost and proper ice, Jeziorki

This time six years ago:
Alcohol, servant not master

This time nine years ago:

Classic car quiz, 2015

This time ten years ago:

Classic British Car Quiz, 2014

This time 11 years ago:

The poet's gift - an exploration into Why One Writes

This time 12 years ago:

Advertising H&M on Warszawa Centralna station

This time 13 years ago:

Jeziorki in the snow

This time 17 years ago:

Staying Underground: Piccadilly Circus

Procrastination, time and mindfulness

"Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion." (C. Northcote Parkinson, 1955)

"If you wait until the last minute, it only takes a minute to do." (The Stock-Sanford corollary to Parkinson's law.)

But what if you don't do it, what if you just push it (whatever it is) further on into the future?

Mentally juggling the tasks ahead of me before I go out for the evening, I'm pondering which ones are most important and in what order I should tackle them, and what the consequences of not doing them are. There's a finite time limit: quarter past four in the afternoon, that's when I have to leave to catch the train into town.

It's Saturday morning. The worst that could happen is that I simply end up shifting the tasks on into the future. At least I have no office work requiring my attention before Monday; the weekend is my own. But is it? There's cider-making (clearing the ground under the apple-trees, collecting windfall apples, juicing them and filling a ten-litre demijohn). There's cleaning the house (usually, this can wait). There's blogging (I've not written for a while). And a book I want to read. And my exercises. 

Breakfast over. I take a peek outside – it's raining. And so, I have An Excuse. Not to waste time, I double down on my exercises. Wow! I managed eight pull-ups! (Four sets of pull-ups done. Seven, seven, eight and seven. Twenty nine in total.) Now onto the back extensions... six sets of eight. Done. Now onto the sit-ups... Sixty. Done. Now onto the weights. Four sets of 30. Press-ups, three times twenty, and eight minutes of plank (two times four minutes).

Time should be measured by entropy, not seconds, minutes and years. The process of order turning into chaos. Wasting time means letting chaotic processes unfold.

{{ czas chce nas skrzywdzić }} – 'time wants to harm us'.

I'm not one for being pro-active. Sure, I react, when prodded, I respond. What really drives me, though, is not material. It is mystical; metaphysical. I do believe in an overarching Cosmic Purpose. So much of what happens to us in our lives, the major junctions at which we take this turn or that, are determined by chance. We think we have control over our destinies, and yet looking back we can see how much was preordained. 

However, how much we do, how much we achieve – this is determined by our strength of will. How much we push over into the future, rather than doing today. But then on the other hand, avoiding stress is important to living longer. Don't get worked up over work. If your procrastination leads to levels of stress that you can't cope with, then either learn to let go, or work on reducing the amount of time you waste on the inconsequential. 

As I get older, I see the importance of measuring outcomes. My health and fitness spreadsheet (now in its 11th year) is crucial to this. But while I can demonstrate empirically how I can build up strength of will (and through it, physical strength) from year to year, seemingly in defiance of the ageing process, I cannot will inspiration, creativity, contact with the numinous. And at this moment, I receive an intuition – pray for these things, and they will come. Meditate, mindfully.

This time time two years ago:
Summer as it should be

This time three years ago:
Measuring the unmeasurable

This time five years ago:
Heading Home [my father leaves Warsaw for the last time]

This time seven years ago:
From my father's historic return to Warsaw

This time eight years ago:
Country life in a capital city 

This time ten years ago:
My ogród is my działka

This time 12 years ago:
Mazowieckie province tempts with mini- and micro-breaks

This time 14 years ago:
Pride and anger

From automatic action to mindful control

This is a familiar notion in terms of acquiring any new skill. As an example, I'll take learning to drive a car.

You start from the position of unconscious incompetence. You don't even know what it is that you don't know. As it begins to dawn on you just how much you need to understand – movements you must coordinate, mental checklists to master, traffic signs, and the rules of the road you must remember – you move to conscious incompetence. 

Now you are beginning to be aware of how much there is to learn, you start putting the theory into practice. In time, you move towards conscious competence. You're aware of depressing the clutch each time before shifting gear; you're aware of all the actions needed to negotiate a roundabout – brakes, shift down, mirror, indicate; looking left and right. 

Your first driving lessons are stressful. The brain is fatigued; fear overcomes you as you realise that you're in control of a tonne or more of steel, glass and rubber, moving with deadly kinetic potential at thirty metres per second. 

But with time, with practice, the process of driving a car becomes easier and easier. Now you have acquired unconscious competence. You no longer have to think about what you're doing – you just do it. Everything falls into place. You take your test, and you pass it. Sometimes it takes several attempts; no matter – you have become a driver. And you're not unique in this. 

Billions of other human beings have acquired this skill too. It has become automatic. We've all experienced that moment when, lost in your own train of thoughts, you suddenly realise you have covered many miles without having any conscious awareness of the actual road, landmarks passed, especially if it's a well-known route. 

So – my point is this. Is unconscious competence enough? 

It's in this state of mind that most road accidents occur. Bear this in mind – 3,700 people died in road accidents around the world yesterday. Half of them will have been pedestrians or cyclists. Nearly all accidents, fatal or those resulting in injury, will have happened with the participants in a state of unawareness.

Setting off for a walk, or a drive, or a motorbike ride, or a train journey, I utter a small prayer for my safe return, coupled to an expression of conscious gratitude for having got through another day, for my health, for my luck. 

And here's the thing. Is the very act of being aware of the need to consciously look out for myself physical mindfulness – sharpening my observation, my forethought and anticipation, taking care – or is there a metaphysical element involved as well? A guardian angel looking out for me? The same spiritual entity that provides me with intuition, that aligns my flow with that of the Cosmos?

Quidquid agis, prudenter agas, et respice finem. 

Meditation means consciously disassociating the mind from matter. Mindfulness is engaging with the physical realm in a state of high awareness. 

This time last year:
Keep on keeping on

This time two years ago:
Time and Consciousness

This time three years ago:
Altered states - higher planes

This time eight years ago:
Warsaw-Radom line modernisation - Czachówek

This time 14 years ago:
Climbing Mogielica