In September 2023, I visited the 20,000-person community of Kurikka, Finland. Kurikka is the kind of place that will never go into any Finnish guidebook, but it’s where I had a lot of great moments in Finland for my first-ever visit to the Nordic nation.

At the center of the city I found this statue of a very famous Finnish skier, Juha Mieto. It turns out a completely unknown Finnish woman who connected me to my distant relatives in Finland this summer also has a connection to Kurikka and Mieto too, and I had no way of knowing that at the time I saw this statue.

Several months before I was standing in the Kurikka city center, I had been in touch with my “email friend” in Finland asking her for help. Our interaction was an entirely serendipitous human connection that tipped the scales of fate for me and had brought me to this very spot.

Today I learned she is a blood relative of this very famous Finnish national skier. The famous Mieto grabbed a gold medal a 1976 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, New York, and also a silver medal, in the 1980 Winter Olympics in Innsbruck, Austria, finishing one one-hundredth of a second behind his Swedish rival, Thomas Wassberg.  

Kurikka is also the home city of Finnish relatives I found through my benefactor’s help.

When I visited one of my Finnish relatives in Kurikka in September 2023, I first saw this statue. I photographed it because it was distinct, but I didn’t fully appreciate who I was photographing at the time—a Finnish sports legend. I mentioned this visit in my story about my trip and seeing this statue. I shared the story with my benefactor as a late “thank you” gift to show how important her help was to me. And that’s when she mentioned her personal connection to Kurikka and the man turned into a bronze ski statue.

Talk about funny coincidences. Life is full of them. I have always found that the more you do things to go where your instincts are telling you to go, the more these things will happen. Perhaps good luck, my connection to friendly stranger, and maybe something more made all of this happen.

The famous Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung created the term synchronicity to explain relationships between events that could not be explained by simple cause and effect logic.

Jung suggested that unique and synchronistic events had meaningful connections rooted in perceptions. He explained it this way: “I found where ‘coincidences’ which were connected so meaningfully that their ‘chance’ concurrence would represent a degree of improbability that would have to be expressed by an astronomical figure.”

I have long thought that synchronicity can be harnessed, especially when I felt it working in wonderous ways for me. I fortunately could tap into that for my trip to Finland.

I would not say that I’m “extraordinary.” I’m just me. And I felt synchronicity the entire time I was planning my trip and then having one of the most rewarding times of my life.

I also have a bit of advice. Trust the siren when you hear it. It calls for a reason.