The Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Carl Jung coined the term “synchronicity” in the mid-20th century to refer to a “meaningful coincidence of two or more events where something other than probability of chance is involved.”

When we actively open our eyes to witness random acts of meaning at play, we can become fervent “meaning makers”. While traveling and experiencing new surroundings, it can become even more apparent that something deeper than chance is working its magic. Sometimes when we feel “out of place”, our current place can feel like it is teaching us something we didn’t know we needed to know. We can begin to see ourselves and the journey we are on within the natural world that we find ourselves in. Traveling heightens our senses to nature and our surroundings because our bodies and minds are itching to discover and make meaningful connections.

Professor Roderick Main, a Jungian scholar at the University of Essex, has written extensively about synchronicity and how meaningful connections and coincidences can have spiritual resonance. For Main and also for Jung, causally unconnected events can suggest, “a superordinate level of reality that in some sense is unitary, what Jung referred to by a term borrowed from alchemy: the unus mundus or ‘one world.’” Does the world ever feel more as one than when we are embracing the unknown in a new environment? Why is it that when we are out of our comfort zone, do we feel more connected to humankind and the world around us?

Take a Personal Journey

Here’s a challenge for us all: What if we opened ourselves up to actively learn from everything we see, touch, or feel as if there was a cosmic connection to us experiencing every moment? Maybe we would feel more connected to the unus mundus. This curiosity, enchantment and search for significance is something that exists within us when we are kids but is often buried under practicality as we age. All of us asked a grown-up at one point in our lives, “why is the sky blue”, right? Somewhere along the way those questions felt too trivial, insignificant or maybe we forgot to ask them entirely because there were bigger fish to fry. Traveling gives us the space to be as curious as we once were. That curiosity helps us connect to the natural world and feel a greater sense of peace toward our place within it.

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