WINNER OF THE ASHTON WYLIE AWARD

New Zealand Book Awards for writers of the Mind, Body & Spirit genre.

“We can’t change the past and we can’t predict the future, so we must always live in the now and appreciate it for all its glory. The ‘Now’ is really all that exists, Ayla. Some people spend their whole life waiting to start living. The time is now!”

Jennifer McIntosh has woven valuable insights into this enchanting story of nine-year old Ayla and her elderly neighbour, Pearl. Through the teenage years, Pearl shares her wisdom and uses her cherished collection of cushions as metaphors to gently share poignant lessons on love, faith, hope loss and other first encounters, as Ayla ‘comes of age’.

‘As she said this I realised it basically summed up my day – just happening to look up ast the right moment in order to find Pearl’s windmill cushion; Andrew driving back home at exactly the right moment to see me; the song playing in his car that had been stuck in my head for seemingly no reason – all the similarities we shared, even down to the car number plates. This synchronicity was like some mysterious process underlying life.

“You see,” Pearl continued, “coincidences are not merely due to chance. There are no accidents. Synchronicities are people, places or events that your soul attracts into your life to help you and to place emphasis on something going on in your life.

“Synchronicities can be regarded as signs, and we can consciously use them to help make decisions in life. They’re occurences that seem to defy the calculations of probability.”

That was exactly how I had been feeling. Too much had happened between Andrew and I to simply be put down to chance, or coincidence. This new word, synchronicity, seemed to explain it all – it was like a wink from the cosmos, like angels without wings. I think I, too, had found my new favourite word – it even felt fun to say: synchronicity. My head was begining to feel full of this new concept and all it represented.

I expressed to Pearl the enormity of what I was feeling, and how this one word of hers was rapidly changing how I now viewed the world, and watched as her eyes twinkled and danced.

“Excellent,” she said, with a smile. “Remember though, darlin’, that these synchronistic events may not always be positive. It often takes something unpleasant or hurtful to create major learning in one’s life, and that is the point of why things come to us as they do... so we can learn from them.”