Synchronicity

I have started to become more and more aware of synchronicity... coincidences in life that are a sort of signal or voice from the Universe, giving me answers to certain queries or insights into something that seems unfathomable.

Recently, two movies by Roman Polanski have come to me and Durox by pure coincidence. The first was Cul-de-Sac, a black-and-white movie about a couple who live in a remote, old castle in England and is suddenly taken hostage by a gangster who, supposedly assuming the role of a guest in the house, turned around and took charge of everything, subjecting the hosts to a subserviant and threatened existence. Coincidentally, we rented this movie the day after our two summer guests had gone. And it was a chilling reflection of what we had gone through. (Whew!)

More recently, we happened to have rented The Tenant. Polanski, who plays the main character in the movie, is a new tenant in a Parisian apartment whose previous occupant committed suicide. He himself gradually turns paranoid after continuous pestering, complaints and threats by his cold neighbors. Eventually he commits suicide, mirroring the same fate as the preceding tenant. Because he is so mild-mannered and soft spoken, he sort of let his neighbors wear him down. One of his friends, however, shows him how to treat neighbors: play music as loudly as possible, and even march around the house. If the neighbors knock on the door, you can tell them off! Well, this is not necessarily a wise thing to do in reality. But I think this movie does give us something we could use.

Last night our next-door neighbor banged on the wall very loudly when we were watching a video tape and laughing. The wall shook. I looked at the clock. It was 11:20 p.m. Okay, so we broke the "rule of silence" after 11 p.m. In any case, the neighbor could have come and talked to us instead of knocking on the wall. She has done this several times now (sometimes even when we hadn't broken the 11 p.m. rule), and it makes us very upset every time. It's not like she is not disturbing us. Her baby cries very loudly all the time, and it does disturb us. But babies cannot be blamed. So it's just her against us. (We also have several uptight neighbors who are control freaks in the building and have pestered us--just like those in the movie.)

Now, what The Tenant gives us, is the idea that we cannot let strange neighbors take charge of our sanity. We must not let them grind us down, otherwise we'd go insane. We'll be more careful in the future, and at the same time we shall not let the neighbors dictate us. No!