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“Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans,” John Lennon presciently wrote in his song Beautiful Boy on his final album, a sentiment I have found to be quite accurate. Fortunately, the unexpected can also work out favorably, sometimes taking us in an entirely new and happier direction.
Serendipity — the occurrence and development of events by chance in a happy or beneficial way — has played a significant role in my life, so much so that I feel it has outweighed all my carefully laid out plans, both personal and professional. I like the idea of serendipity in that it allows me to think there is a grand design to life, i.e., that things happen for a reason.
Three short examples, which I would venture are quite typical. In 2005, I semi-retired to South Beach, happily ensconcing myself in a little deco apartment for what I thought would be the rest of my natural life. Writing during the day and partying at night was as good as it gets for a confirmed bachelor like me, I was convinced, so why change a thing?
But soon met someone at an event, and the rest, as they say, is history. It wasn’t long before I was living on the mainland, a dad, and married (in that order), all because my future wife and I happened to go to this meet-up. (My partying now consists of birthday celebrations populated by 10-year-old girls and decorated with rainbows and unicorns.) I had many other entertainment options that fateful evening, I recall, making the one I almost randomly chose a life-altering experience.
Another example took place a couple of years before that. I had just landed at Newark Airport and was making my way out when I happened to run into someone I had once worked with in Minneapolis. This person, who was now at a Boston ad agency, was looking for a consultant in my field, and boom — I suddenly had a great gig that shifted my career trajectory. All I could think of at the time was how lucky it was that he or I hadn’t landed at LaGuardia or Kennedy on that particular day at that particular time.
Oddly enough, a third serendipitous occasion also took place at an airport. Bored while waiting for a plane in Miami, I picked up an abandoned Life section of USA Today that was in the seat next to me and glanced at the book bestseller list. Being a non-fiction writer, I hadn’t read a novel in literally decades, wanting nothing to do with words when I wasn’t researching or writing myself.
However, while looking at the list, I noticed a novel that sounded interesting, and I immediately bought a copy at the bookstore that was just steps away. Since then, I’ve read hundreds of novels, something that has immeasurably enriched my life. I’m convinced that this would not have happened that a particular newspaper section had not been within arm’s reach that day.
The moral? Life does happen to you while you’re making other plans, meaning we should place more value on the role of serendipity in shaping our future. It may be just the statistics or odds of chance, but I can’t help but think that serendipity is magical, a mystical force that occasionally makes its presence known. Rather than spend so much time and energy trying to engineer what lies ahead, we may be better off just opening ourselves up to the possibilities of tomorrow.
