Was It Synchronicity, Mere Coincidence, or Something Else?
Personal Perspective: A selection from my lexicon of weird experiences.
Posted July 18, 2025 | Reviewed by Tyler Woods
Continuing my stories of weird things that have happened to me, I’d like to share an uncanny coincidence I endured the summer I was 18 years old.
Carl Jung called coincidences "synchronicity" if they had some meaningful significance to the people who experienced them. Jung also claimed that synchronicity may validate the existence of the paranormal, but he never did any scientific studies to prove this. Synchronicity supposes events may be causally unrelated yet have an unknown non-causal connection. That is what makes them so interesting and eerie.
I don’t know what meaning the following event had for me, but it was definitely not normal. And, it’s something that's stayed in my memory ever since.
Right after I graduated high school, with my eyes on beginning a pre-med college major in the fall, I went to work in a hospital emergency room. The layout of the ER floor plan was a large rectangle with the nurse's station in the middle of two hallways and all the treatment rooms along the opposite sides of the hallways.
The Urgency Map Was a Key Component in the ER
Prominently placed in the nurse's station was our Urgency Map. It was a large dry-erase whiteboard with the floor plan printed on it. Into each of the squares representing treatment rooms, the triage nurse would write the patient's last name and condition, for example: Smith - Chest Pain; Jones - Migraine ; Miller - Laceration; Brown - Sprained Ankle, and so forth. The purpose of this was so the doctor on duty could step into the nurse's station and see at a glance where the next priority was.
One Saturday morning, the ER became very busy; all the rooms filled up, and there were patients still in the waiting room. The doctor rushed from room to room all day, and then finally, in the afternoon, he got stuck with a complicated case for about an hour. During that time, the entire ER cleared out.
The Charge Nurse Played a Prank on the Doctor
One of the nurses pointed to the blank Urgency Map and said, "Dr. Kennerly is going to like the sight of that when he comes out of treatment room six." Maryann, the charge nurse, was a prankster. She said, "Let's have some fun with him when he gets out." She then went to the whiteboard and filled in all the squares by writing in each ER employee's last name and an ailment for each. By my name, she wrote “Bee Sting.”
A few minutes later, Dr. Kennerly walked into the nurses' station, looked at the full whiteboard, and cried out, "Oh no!" He then rushed over to get a closer look in order to see where he needed to go next; within a few seconds, he recognized all the staff’s names and laughed out loud in relief. The whole nurse's station joined in the laughter .
About an hour later, my shift ended and I went home. When I got there, my mother asked me to mow the lawn—actually, just a section of it that was very shaded, where grass wouldn't grow, only weeds. It was a section of the lawn that we only needed to mow once or twice a year.
Somehow, I Got Pranked Too
I changed into a T-shirt, running shorts—you know how short those are—and a pair of sneakers, and started mowing the weeds. A few minutes later, I felt a burning sensation on my butt. I turned around to see a swarm of yellow jacket wasps flying up out of the ground where I had just mowed. I ran as fast as I could, but not before I got four stings on my left butt cheek. I couldn't sit down for three days after that.
The next day, when I went into work, I told Maryann what happened, and then I added, "I'm just so grateful that you didn't put me down for getting hit by a bus!"
What lesson did I learn from that? I wondered, is this some sort of Law of Attraction thing? Did I somehow attract those bee stings because Maryann wrote it on the whiteboard?
One thing I did learn was that situational awareness is important regardless of where you are. If I had been paying attention , I might have noticed the yellow jackets flying toward and away from a single spot on the ground in front of me as I mowed.
Was there anything otherworldly or paranormal about this experience? I don’t know, but because it was so weird and it happened so quickly after Maryann seemingly predicted it, I have never been able to forget it. What do you think?
Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle by Joe Cambray, Ph.D., for the International Association for Analytical Psychology
A Library Guide to Jung's Collected Works, from the Pacifica Graduate Library: https://pacifica.libguides.com/Jung/synchronicity
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Robert Wilson is a writer and humorist based in Atlanta, Georgia.
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This article is part of the Bringwise Psychology Journal — daily insights on human behavior, mental health, and personal growth.