While traveling by myself in India, I had many synchronistic experiences that proved to me how small the world is and how meaningful connections and experiences truly are. While in McLeod Ganj/Dharamsala in the Himalayas, I happened upon a CD shop where I spent about an hour listening to music and choosing CDs I wanted to buy. Another traveler was there as well -- an attractive guy my age who had a familiar energy about him. We smiled at each other and spoke a couple words about music, then went our respective ways.

A month or so later -- after having traveled from McLeod Ganj to Kurukshetra and Delhi -- I found myself in Rishikesh. I arrived rather late in the day and needed to find a hotel and some food pronto. I stopped at the first big place I happened by and paid for a room. I left my things there and was heading out to grab a bite when the door across the way opened and a guy my age walked out. We smiled at each other as we began walking down the hall. One of us started talking to the other -- not sure who -- and we found out that we were both heading out to eat. We ended up dining together that evening and that meal was the first of many we shared.  

We became fast friends. We both were incredibly introspective, psychologically inclined and on a spiritual journey of deep importance. We shared stories, laughs, fights and sorrows. We meditated for hours together. We evoked each other's deepest wounds while at the same time provided each other's deepest healing. We were truly one another's teacher on a profound level.

One day while we were eating dinner, we were talking about the places we had traveled, and we both said we had visited McLeod Ganj at the same time. We found this rather synchronistic, and we mused about how we may have walked right by one another. Then all of a sudden -- in an electric, lucid moment we both looked at each other with shocked looks upon our faces. It dawned on us that we were both in the CD shop together!

He was the very same person that was perusing CDs at the same time that I was. It was an odd moment of clarity -- realizing we had crossed paths before but had forgotten. And when we thought about all that passed between that time at the CD shop and the time we both walked out of our rooms into the hall where we ran into one another again -- we realized that something greater than ourselves must have conspired to bring us together. The fact that we both ended up in the same hotel, on the same floor, in the same city in all of India was just too synchronistic to pass off as mere coincidence. The rest of our trip was replete with synchronicities and life experiences that truly were meant to be.

It's moments like these that make me feel the interconnection of life quite palpably. The world truly is small. The paths we take and those that cross them are meant to be on a very deep level -- whether or not we are aware of it. The mystery and beauty of that realization will always be with me, and as a result I see people and things differently now. You never know who your next best friend is -- or your next teacher. You never know who in your life is an angel in disguise.