I hadn’t thought about her in over a year. No particular reason. No emotional weight behind it. She just drifted across my mind, calmly, clearly, and I noted it, then moved on.

Half an hour later, my phone buzzed. A message from her. No small talk, no explanation. Just a photo of a jade tree I’d given her a while back. It looked healthy. Thriving, actually. She thought I’d like to see how well it was doing.

I thanked her for the photo, wished her well, and left it at that. I didn’t feel any great pull to re-engage, but the moment stayed with me, not because of her, but because of the timing. The randomness. The feeling that something just lined up.

Carl Jung had a name for this kind of thing: synchronicity. He defined it as a “meaningful coincidence”. Two or more events connected not by cause and effect, but by meaning. They happen together, seemingly by chance, but resonate with something deeper. He saw it as a sign that there’s more to reality than we can see or measure. That sometimes, our inner world and the outer world speak to each other. Quietly. Precisely.

I’m not someone who needs to romanticize everything. People reach out. Thoughts come and go. But there was something clean about this particular moment; no buildup, no emotional noise. Just the sense of a thread that hadn’t fully frayed. A small echo between two people, delivered through a jade tree and a phone screen.

There’s no need to dig into it more than that. I wasn’t longing for her. I wasn’t unresolved, but when synchronicity shows up like this, I pay attention. Not because I think it means something I need to act on, but because it reminds me I’m connected to more than just what’s in front of me.

Jung believed these moments reflected the presence of a collective unconscious, a shared field of symbolic meaning, memory, and emotion. A psychic network we’re all tuned into, whether we realize it or not. Maybe that’s true. Maybe it’s simpler than that. Maybe we just carry people with us in subtle ways, and now and then, something stirs.

What I know is this: there was no reason for her to reach out when she did. And no reason for me to be thinking of her right before. But she did. And I was. And I’m glad I noticed.

The jade tree is still growing. That’s enough.