"In chance events both emotionally and symbolically meaningful, our psychological experience of a synchronicity always occurs to enable us to move forward in some way...if we are characters in a story, the ending may not be a happy one, but the life we are living is at least one that is whole and coherent. It is the function of synchronicity to help us see this wholeness -- if not goodness --- behind the ups and downs of each chapter of the life we live."

There Are No Accidents: Synchronicity and the Stories of Our Lives - Robert H. Hopcke

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Shining involves more than just being good at something.

It means glowing from the inside because what you are involved with is so in line with what resonates that you just can't help radiate contentment and inspiration. Which answers the question of why we're here - helping others find their way.

The path that you tread on the way to shining, well, that may resemble a never-ending board game with so many chutes and ladders. This requires your being open to where that talent or interest may take you while you are areachin' and adabblin'.

Possibly in directions that you would never have thought of on your own, thank god - or goddess, or the universe, or whatever you name the creative power greater than ourselves - since our paltry ideas usually aren’t anywhere close to what that deity had in mind.

The story line of my life is riddled with such synchronistic events, so much so that I can't imagine the moving forward that Hopcke refers to above happening any other way.

You may or may not put much stock in this phenomenon, and it's not my intention here to convert you.

If however you are looking for that "wholeness and coherence" Hopcke refers to above, coming across this web page, today, by chance, out of all the millions of others you might be glancing at this moment, well, maybe there's something to it, eh?

I’ll share a chapter from my own life story to illustrate.

As I was growing up, the small mid-western town in which I lived was not the ideal backdrop for the proclivity points I had preferences for and activities in which I wanted to dabble. Not possessing the degree of rebelliousness or a developed inner compass that could propel me into a more hospitable environment, I nevertheless was vigilant for escape.

Many of my free hours were spent babysitting for family friends, so one of the dreams my sensibilities constructed to deliver me from my personal hell was to become a nanny for a family in a suburb of the bright lights, big city four hours to the south.

Every Sunday I would retrieve the Jobs section from this metro area’s newspaper delivered to our doorstep and would immediately inhale the ads under the "Domestic Help Wanted" column.

From the authors’ words in the ads, I would extrapolate my vision of how life would be gloriously different in those locales. Much comfort was gleaned from those meanderings, and much grooming of desire.

High school turned into college, and while I did manage to temporarily find respite from the small-town mentality on several occasions, I was still physically stuck.

I told a girlfriend about my dream. A few years later around graduation time, through our college’s placement office she discovered and decided to pursue a nanny position with a family - not in the metro area which I had always lusted after, where my friend actually hailed from, but in a bedroom community of New York City!

We joked about her "stealing" my dream, but I was happy for my friend. We kept in touch, and within a few months, she wrote to say (this was before the advent of email, youngsters out there :~) that another family in the same neighborhood, expecting their third child very soon, was looking for a nanny to help out, and they were interested in learning more about me!

Long story short, I was on the first plane out after my own midyear graduation, thrilled to finally be living a dream come true after years of willing it into existence.

My employers were generous and decent people who made my transition as a member of their household an effortless one.

I had Sundays and Tuesdays off, room and board included in my salary, a friend in the neighborhood, and all that NYC has to offer a train ride away – except for the fact that the trains were on strike and torrential rain fell every bloody Sunday for the first three months of my tenure there.

I spent a lot of time in the library.

While I did enjoy working for the family who had hired me, I quickly understood that there was more for me to experience than staying with them indefinitely.

Wanting to put the undergrad teaching degree I had just completed to good use, my sites were set upon my next transition.

Another dream I'd kept alive was to live overseas, particularly in England or Italy, after spending time there briefly during the classic, whirlwind collegiate encounter with Europe.

I'd even transferred to another university to study Italian for a year in anticipation of fulfilling this dream.

My “real job” hunting efforts at the time, however, were invested in writing a resume, getting it printed, and mailing it to every vacancy notice I could get my hands on here in the good ol’ USA. How did we ever survive without the internet?

My friend, also a teacher candidate, and I responded to a generic ad placed in the local newspaper by a teacher placement agency in a nearby suburb.

I don’t remember why, but it seemed like a good idea to rent a bare-bones Chevette and drive us both to the agency to fill out our paperwork, rather than mail it in.

Retrieving that rental vehicle after it was towed from in front of a "No Parking After 5:30" sign was part of the adventure, but that’s a story for another time.

That was in the spring. In late June, I happened to be home taking care of the baby by myself, when the phone rang.

The headmaster of a private, American boarding school in Rome, Italy, of all places! looking for a teacher to fill a vacancy was on the other end.

The group of Catholic brothers he belonged to ran the school, and he used the placement agency I had registered with when there were positions to fill.

As he was in town for only a few days, he wondered if I could meet with him for an interview.

Oh my. I was home by myself with the baby, the rest of the family vacationing a few states away.

I didn't think this man would be interested in talking to me while I held a five-month old in my arms. Then I had an idea.

If he were game and could find an automobile to borrow and come to me on the day that the housekeeper regularly showed up, she could watch the baby while I sat out on the deck with the headmaster!

Turns out he was game. I don't remember much about the interview except how cool it was pretending that it was my deck that we were seated at.

It went well enough though that a few days later, on July 4th as a matter of fact, I was offered the job!

Oh. my. god.

A check arrived to purchase a ticket. When should I fly out? School started the first Monday in September, but I needed a work visa from an Italian consulate before I would be legal to enter the country as a foreign employee.

Oh, what the heck - get to New York on Thursday, stop-and-shop at the consulate on Friday, and wing my way to Rome later that evening, right?

What I didn't know was that it might require repeated visits to the consulate before obtaining the necessary stamp in my passport.

With all my luggage in tow, I sat in line outside the building with equally desperate types.

As the gates opened for admittance, I was the last one ushered in before the doors were locked to any more applicants that day.

Six hours ahead of time with visa in hand, I checked in at the airport with an airline employee who told the computer the last two unassigned seats on the flight were taken, and instructed me to immediately stretch out on all three of those seats in my row and pretend I was asleep so no one would attempt to sit there.

But wait, there's more. Before I left, I happened to be introduced to an expatriate, a business woman from Rome who was kind enough to give me the names, addresses, and phone numbers of several people my age who spoke English that I could contact should I be interested in doing that.

The drive in from Ciampino Airport that Saturday is burned into my memory. I knew on a cellular level that this was where I was meant to be. The color of the light, the stucco on the buildings, the sound of the language rolling off people's tongues, the food! glorious food - it all enveloped me in a tribal sea of acceptance.

I know, I know - it's an amazing story. And it all happened just that way. I did my part with areachin' and adabblin', and the rest is, well, history.

Here are some other examples of ordinary people dabbling in what resonates, minding their own business, when an experience - synchronicity perhaps? - takes them by the hand and leads them to shine, shine in ways they couldn't have predicted or understood before that chapter was written.

http://www.starbuckseverywhere.net/

http://www.mil-millington.com/

http://www.dooce.com/

So what? Who cares? What difference does it make whether certain people have cool stuff happen to them and their lives shoot off in directions they wouldn't have anticipated?

Now we're talkin'....

The difference it makes is quality of life.

The difference it makes is having satisfying experiences that feed your soul, rather than what's showing up in your life feeding on it.

The difference it makes is your joining the ranks of those who follow their dreams instead of someone else's version of them.

Because it can all so easily disappear. In spite of all the perfectness of my young life and my adventure, I wasn't prepared for the "Is that all there is?" kind of thinking that managed to haunt me quite quickly into my tenure there.

Having gotten myself to paradise, it was withering before my eyes.

Dark. Too dark to see. What was going on here?

My twenty-something persona didn't understand it at the time, but my forty-something one does now.

After having assimilated a few decades of the cultural barrage that is popular media and tribe of origin, the me who is really me, she took a vacation for awhile.

She finally knuckled under.

She quit dreaming and merely endured.

She gave in, went along, put other people's happiness before her own, adopted standards of acceptability that weren't anywhere close to the real and true, for her.

She went into hiding. Not very successfully. Not very happily. Not very healthfully. Not very well.

Oh, there were the occasional life-lines extended to repair my frayed connection - vivid dreams, and synchronicities, and finally, rage - fuel enough to boost me out of despair and snap back into life. My life.

It's a mighty fine blessing that we can't entirely break from that connection - we can pretend it isn't there, but it knows better, and keeps calling us, even when we get ourselves into a place of abject depression.

God, Spirit, Soul, whatever term resonates with your idea of how the universe works - it keeps calling with the recognition, "It's not supposed to be like this!"

We know it. Our individual cells know it. But unless we really live it that way, we get the choices that we make minute by minute, played out in the people and events that show up in our lives.

What's showing up in yours?