KIAROS, SYNCHRONICITY, OR  "COINCIDENCE" 
A synchronicitous moment, is when a weird co-incidence seems to have strange 
and uncanny undertones of some deep meaning.The Greeks with their ancient culture 
have the word, "Kiaros" which means "at exactly the right moment".

This is a true story. It is a living example of Synchronicity,  Kiaros or "coincidence"
St. Thomas Aquinas, the great catholic theologian once said; " the highest manifestation 
of life consists in this, that a being governs its own actions, a thing which is always 
subject to the directions of another is somewhat of a dead thing"

But believers in Synchronicity say that beings do not govern their own actions;these 
actions are governed by a greater force than either human or coincidence.

I had two friends who live some distance apart, never actually met, although they 
had so much in common .I knew they would get on, if I could only get their visits 
to coincide.

One of these friends, a quiet man but a skilled mechanic with a love for old 
motorbikes in gratitude for my counselling help in a sensitive family situation,gave 
me a superb rare bottle of single malt from one of the very small Scottish distilleries.

This distillery was so small it was not included in the Whisky makers lists, and
this bottle was too good to drink without a really good celebration to set it off. So 
it stayed on my sideboard for some weeks, while I mentally debated its fate.

The other friend a real dour Scot, popped in one evening and stood in shock as 
he saw the whisky bottle, and told us it was a tiny distillery at the side of a house, 
near to where he lived in Scotland, and his mothers friend was living with the distiller, 
this was the only bottle he had ever seen outside of Scotland, the production was 
little more than 100 bottles a year which went almost entirely to a senator in the U.S.A.

How did I come by it? As I recounted the story, that it was a gift from the other friend, 
who then decided he too would pop in unexpectedly. Now the two friends, both 
coming on the spur of the moment sat on my settee together, and the Scottish lad 
took out a photo from his wallet of an old motorbike and the make and model matched 
the machine parked outside.

Were these two guys meant to meet or what? I just could not get my head round all 
this, when the thought occurred to me that psychologists say the difficulty all of us 
have in grasping new concepts which disturb our existing views of the world is 
called;" Cognitive dissonance"

That confirmed entrenched scepticism, could often be allied to autistic outlook and 
behaviour.All this was compounded by a tune that kept going round in my head for 
a couple of weeks, that I could not get out of my brain, so whistling the tune to the two 
lads in my front room, one an expert on fifties rock music said straight away, "red river 
rock, by Johnny and the Hurricanes."

I exclaimed I had not heard this tune for about 40 years.A couple of days later I picked 
up a newspaper to read that the leader of the Hurricanes, died the previous week.

I was shaken at this synchronicitous event and in phoning my friends, they insisted I 
had to open the whisky bottle.The taste of a good Scottish malt, is as the kiss of a 
beautiful woman, confident, fruity, brain-numbing, and with an inbuilt desperation 
for another. Both are not to be taken lightly.

I appreciate the sceptics who will say that these events are all just coincidence. They 
maybe right, but I was quite taken by these small linked events.

In reflection, I remembered of the words of Henry Newbolt: "the years like great oxen 
tread the world and god the herdsman goads them on behind, and I am broken by 
their passing feet."

These coincidences just steam-rollered me, as surely as if I had been run down 
by a herd of oxen.

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