I recently visited some friends and their little two-year-old boy. I'd just about driven past her town on the freeway, when I decided it would be fun to stop by their house to see if they wanted to go out for dinner at a Chinese restaurant in their town. I drove up to their house, and they said, "Yes!", so we went to the very restaurant that (unbeknownst to me) their little boy had been begging to go to for a couple of days.

This same little boy's mother told me about how she'd taken him on a nature walk by a creek after they'd read two children's books that morning. One book tells a story about a Dabbler duckling, and the other is a nature book on identifying common American birds. As they parked near a bridge, the mother thought about how they might see some ducklings on the water, even though it is late in the year for ducklings to be bobbing about. The little boy had been reading from his bird book as they drove over to the creek, asking for the names of the birds he was looking at. Since the mother was driving, she asked him to spell out the names. He'd been looking at Black Crowned Night Herons and Green Herons.

When they parked and got out of the car, they heard the call of herons and suddenly spotted FOUR Green Herons at the water's edge! Then they spied some movement in the nearby oak, and saw a larger heron, which at first looked like a Great Blue, until they noticed its black head... and glanced at the heron page again to see that what they were watching was exactly like the picture of the Black Crowned Night Heron! As they walked on they did see a number of ducks, but not necessarily Dabblers. Then they noticed the ducklings! There was a pair of newly hatched ducklings running on the water's surface towards them. "Just like in my Baby Duckling book!" declared the little boy.

Have you ever noticed amazing synchronicities in your life -- the kind of coincidences that seem to be beyond all chance or random happenstance? If your answer is "yes", did you consider how your own thoughts and feelings may have played a role in creating the experience you later enjoyed?

Recognizing that reality shifts in response to our thoughts and feelings is a kind of "magical thinking". The "magic" part is where our imagination recognizes that we are inextricably interconnected to everything else there is, through all time and space. Some of us know about this mystical way of seeing the universe -- the very young, the mystics, and some of our greatest scientists.

This is not a childish phase to be grown out of, but is something we can all aspire to better incorporate into our daily lives.

As Albert Einstein once said:

"I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world."