On Serendipity
I first started thinking about serendipity while looking at some flowers in my garden, This year a clump of cleome, a very tall flower which will self sow if it’s happy, showed up in my lawn, near a planting box where I had been growing cleome from seed for a few years. The cleome clump is not exactly in the way, so we’ve just been mowing around it, it creates a little bit of a need for a detour but not too bad. And most importantly, every time I look at it I smile. It is such a happy accident - more flowers! That planted themselves! It is a perfect example of co-creation between garden and gardener, between the natural realm and the human one.
Self-sowing is when plants seed themselves, when they plant themselves by natural forces scattering their seeds about. Plants can propagate themselves in many ways but the most common is by seed. Wild plants, the ones humans don’t plant, are most familiar to gardeners and laymen alike as weeds. There are different kinds: beneficial and malignant weeds, perennial and annual, native and invasive. The important thing is that they just show up randomly and do their plant thing which is grow as big as the available resources allow. And then we come along and decide whether they are good plants or bad plants.
Shit happens - but sometimes good shit happens. Actually it might even be slightly more positive than negative. But humans have this terrible tendency to see the negative more than the positive - its called negativity bias. Negativity bias is the human inclination for negative events and experiences to have a greater impact on a person’s thoughts or behavior than positive or neutral events do. It stands to reason in an evolutionary sense, being sensitive to dangers both large and small in the world around you could save your life. The problem is that we don’t have worry about wild animals carrying away our children any more. We live very safe and protected lives now.
There’s also something called hedonistic adaptation, through which people adapt to either a negative or positive event in their lives and after a crisis eventually return to their personal baseline state of happiness. In proto-psychology, starting with the ancient greeks, people thought there were 4 main personality types: sanguine, choleric, melancholic, phlegmatic. We still do this, think Meyers-Briggs types or Enneagrams. I wonder, is that baseline individual to each person - do people return to that same level every time? If you’re a 5, will you always be a 5? I believe that you can shift your baseline - that’s kind of the whole point of positive psychology. Also, Buddhism.
Serendipity seems like a light weight word, something positive and fun, but of no consequence. However the more I thought about it the more I realized that it symbolizes a much weightier concept. The antonyms were the first clue: tragedy, disaster, accident, calamity. So I started to think about what the equivalently weighted positive antonym to calamity might be and I realized it was miracle. A miracle can be defined as an act of god but it also means something that is improbable or extraordinary but very welcome, like an airplane accident when everyone survives. What struck me about all these etymological questions was the underlying vibe: something happening that is surprising but not bad, which possibly could be delightful. And when I started thinking about it that way, I realized that so much of life can be like that.
A few months ago, in my coaching journey, I asked myself the question - what if I assumed that the best was going to happen and that I didn’t have to worry anymore that something bad might happen. This struck me as a terribly sad thing - I realized that I worry all the time and that it doesn’t feel good. I don’t know if its me or a condition of our culture but we are definitely living in some anxious times. I’m just tired of worrying about things not working out and feeling on guard all the time against evil forces. My husband told me years ago that worry doesn’t do anything and he’s right. It’s magical thinking, we feel like if we worry about something, it’s like a protective spell against that thing actually happening, but it’s not.
The idea of luck, good luck, bad luck, misfortune, miracles, it all brings with it judgement. My children had a book that their grandmother gave them called Fortunately/Unfortunately. It’s about a guy who toggles between disaster and good fortune. As with most children’s books it is both funny and illustrates an important part of the human experience. Fortune seems to exists in a wave form, we go back and forth throughout our lives between good and bad fortune and sometimes it isn’t easy to tell them apart, especially at first. Think of those commuters who missed their train and were running late to work on the morning of 9/11 whose lives were saved by their bad luck.
There’s a rhyme but no reason, that’s what makes it confusing to us. There are rules, there are patterns, but the patterns are generated randomly, according to laws of nature that we only partially understand. Things that occur develop their reason after the fact. The story of my husband and I meeting so many years ago is only meaningful because we went on to have a committed relationship and had kids. I remember being blown away by the news that I wouldn’t exist if my mother had married my uncle instead of my father. When you stop and think about how your whole existence is based on chance encounters and the mysteries of genetic recombination, it can be a little disorienting. Talk about feeling groundless!
Life will always be mysterious because it is so complicated, there are always going to be things we can’t know. Why did those cleome grow in that spot? For some reason, I don’t know what but I know it exists, this spot had the right conditions for this plant to grow. Why did my husband’s and my initial attraction turn into a 30 year long partnership? I can think of a few reasons but ultimately, the stars aligned. Not only is it unknown but it is unknowable. And maybe that’s both the blessing and the curse of being human: that we want to know but we can’t. That we are constantly trying to understand something that is beyond our comprehension. And maybe if we can make peace with that, we can see the charm of it. We can be open to moments of serendipity, be present for the miracle of existence, for the wonder and the magical world all around us.