Fate and synchronicity have played a crucial role in my life. When the time was right, things happened. 

In the opening chapter of her novel Endless Night, Agatha Christie wrote: “Is there ever any particular spot where one can put one’s finger and say: ‘It all began that day, at such a time and such a place, with such an incident’?”

If you’re old enough, you can recall certain life-changing moments. Whatever happened on that fateful day − whether it was ‘fate up to its dirty work or dealing out its golden handshake of good fortune’ − was not planned or initiated by you. It just happened.

The Guillaumier family at Buġibba in 1956.

I can trace back when “it all began” to a coincidence in my early 20s, when a Maltese friend advised me where to go for an overseas holiday. A few months later, her travel suggestion led to a chance encounter abroad that determined the course of my life thereafter. 

The next life-changing coincidence in my life happened two years later when I came across an advertisement in an English newspaper that my eldest brother brought with him when he came to lunch with his family one Sunday morning. 

This advertisement made me change my travel plans. Instead of going on a Thomas Cook’s coach tour of the USSR, as planned, I decided to visit the US. The holiday in the US led, in turn, to a four-year residence in Washington, DC.

When my US visa was about to expire, I tried to figure out what to do to continue to live in North America. An article in Time, describing the city of Toronto in 1973 in glowing terms, persuaded me to emigrate to Canada once my stay in Washington would come to an end.

These seemingly random coincidences that determined my destiny and the course of my life became apparent to me only in hindsight many years later. Carl Jung described these coincidences as “synchronicities”.

In his book The Law of Seriality (1919), Austrian biologist Paul Kammerer wrote that coincidences occurred in a series or clusters. This is corroborated by a popular saying that bad luck comes in threes.

I had the good fortune to be born in a comfortable middle-class family on an idyllic, Mediterranean island (before it was ruined), just after the horrors of World War II. 

By the time I was seven years old, it was the early 1950s and things were looking up.

At mid-decade, the Fabulous Fifties were in full swing, with the emergence of rock ’n’ roll and the new youth culture; the spotlight on Hollywood icons, such as Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor and James Dean; and those fabulous cars from Detroit.

In the 1950s, Malta was a well-ordered, homogenous society. The grave problems that the island is currently facing − unbridled construction, rampant corruption, traffic congestion and widespread drug addiction − were non-existent.

These seemingly random coincidences that determined my destiny and the course of my life became apparent to me only in hindsight many years later

I attended St Aloysius College in its heyday, when it had a boarding school for boys and a thriving Jesuit community, from October 1953 to the end of June 1960. It was the beginning of a new decade and the future looked exciting and bright. 

So, let the 1960s begin! Beatlemania and Swinging London; la dolce vita on Via Veneto in Rome; the 1967 'Summer of Love' in San Francisco; and the thrilling race to the moon between the US and the USSR.

In the summer of 1968, I visited the US on holiday and I decided that’s where I wanted to live.

I was enabled to do this after I acquired a student visa to pursue a four-year course of study at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. The four years that I spent at Georgetown − from age 26 to 30 − were the most interesting, exciting and happiest years of my life. I felt as if the sun was shining on me but I knew it wouldn’t last.

After my visa expired, I had no choice but to return to Malta in September 1973. I missed North America terribly, and I made two unsuccessful attempts to emigrate to Canada. When the time was right, fate intervened, as it had on previous occasions in my life.

It just happened that a distant relative who was visiting Malta from the US in August 1974 had a cousin who worked at the Canadian Immigration Department and who was also on holiday in Malta at the same time. It was through my relative’s cousin’s assistance that I managed to emigrate to Canada in January 1975.

After 20 memorable years in Toronto, I returned to Malta for good in April 1995. During my retirement, I fulfilled myself by reading the classics of western literature, as well books on history and philosophy. 

Good fortune and the coincidences I’ve had in my life enabled me to live the life I wanted to lead.

In his theory of synchronicity, Jung adapted Einstein’s theory that cause need not precede effect. According to Jung, synchronicity was beyond mere chance but was not exactly a cause-and-effect relationship.

Synchronicity may be related to the physical laws of time and space. Einstein posited that there is no absolute time and that past, present and future need have no fixed status.

T.S. Eliot expressed the same idea in his poem Four Quartets: “Time present and time past are both perhaps present in time future and time future contained in time past.

“What might have been and what has been point to one end, which is always present.”