Meaningful Coincidences

How and Why Synchronicity and Serendipity Happen

Park Street Press 2022

Pb, £12.99, 224pp, ISBN 9781644115701

Two babies are born at 8.08am on 8/8/08, both weighing 8lb 8oz. A lost ring finds its way back to its owner inside a fish bought for supper. Two people working alongside each other for years accidentally discover they are longlost siblings. A woman passing a phone-box decides to answer the phone ringing inside; the caller is a friend wanting to contact her but has misdialled.

Coincidences are regularly reported in FT and we’ve all experienced them – but what are they? Rationalists hold that they are simply random events happening by chance at the same time. For others they are something more exotic and meaningful, intended in that moment for us alone. Bernard Beitman’s engrossing study, replete with fascinating examples, sheds some light on how both beliefs may be (coincidentally?) true in a bold analysis of our understanding of coincidences. He proposes an innovative theory that goes beyond simplistic notions of “fate” and “randomness” and, surprisingly, suggests that any of us can create and control this “agency”.

A quick sampling of dictionary definitions of coincidence is not much help. Here, Dr Beitman – a pragmatic professor of noetic science and clinical psychiatry – develops the definition of a meaningful coincidence as “the coming together of two or more events in a surprising, unexpected and improbable way that seems to have significance to the person experiencing it, either at the moment or in retrospect”. He begins by examining the two dominant types of coincidence; ones due to physical causes that coincide despite high improbability, and those that have an additional overlay of meaningfulness to those who witness or perceive them.

Beitman points to a survey of American university students he