by Andrew Lam

One morning three winters ago on our way to Monteverde, Costa Rica, my companion and I almost ran over a white faced monkey who sat in the middle of the road. It did not flee as regular monkeys should, but in fact when we stopped to take picture, it did what I can only describe as a friendly human gesture: it stood up and raised one arm high above its head, and waved.

While this went on, another strange thing happened. Fifty yards down the road, there was a cracking noise – and a tree branch fell. It wasn’t big enough to destroy our jeep, but were it to fall, say, on our windshield, it could have shattered it or cause my companion, who was driving, to jerk the wheel or step on the break, and cause a serious accident.

The monkey, you might argue, saved us.

Now, as an American journalist I would like to dismiss it as mere coincidence, that the monkey couldn’t have foreseen the tree branch falling nor did it sit on the road to warn us about it. Yet as someone who spent the bulk of his childhood in Vietnam, my Old World impulse is to say that there is some deep meaning in what had happened, that it was no mere coincidence.

Karl Jung would have agreed, I think. While listening to a difficult patient telling him about a dream in which she was given a piece of jewelry in the shape of a beetle, he heard tapping sounds on his window. A scarab beetle was trying to get in. Jung caught the insect and gave it to her. The therapy went on smoothly after that, as the strange coincidence somehow broke his patient’s resistance, and she soon got to the root of her emotional problems. She had what the therapists would call a “breakthrough.”

Jung call the event synchronicity, a phenomenon where coincidences are “more than chance, less than causality”, a “confluence of events in a numinous or awesome atmosphere.” Often, these synchronicities occurred during points of crisis in people’s lives and contained insights for future growth and development.

In my case, it was the end of a four-year on again, off again relationship. My companion and I had looked at each other with both joy and awe. We went driving on down the road after taking its picture and when I looked back, the monkey was still standing, looking at us.

Not long after Costa Rica, my companion and I broke up for good. Our difficult relationship had been tittering on an abyss for a while but neither of us would accept it, and it was only after the incident in Costa Rica when a monkey stopped us and the tree branch literally blocked our path that we finally faced the fact that our story, too, had come to an end.

Recently, I read that some monkeys in Costa Rica are trained to herd cows. So maybe the white-faced monkey being friendly and waving wasn’t as mysterious as it initially seemed. Still, I believe that that morning on the way to Monte Verde, the universe had co-operated to bring meanings into my life, and I remain grateful for it.

And though one more romance ended, another remains: I am enthralled with the mysterious and “awesome atmosphere” in which nature continues to interfere with my own life; and I feel blessed.

Copyrights Andrew lam
My bio and book is mentioned at Pen American Website