An Exploration of Serendipity, the “Happy Accident” and Free Association

“Surprise!” God implies.

Our lives take a sharp turn

in moments of the absurd.

You opened a window,

and a hummingbird flew in.

You took a left turn

and met your new best friend.

Your life was spared

when you walked through a door,

not realizing it was there.

Everything, everything,

a calculated accident,

something kept hidden

from perceptual faculties,

a Nothingness,

God,

the creation of surprise

splitting masculine and feminine

to what was,

what is,

 and ever shall be

…in a world that never dies…

Suppose you took the unexpressed feminine and strung out all of its paths, like the house of mirrors example I gave in the previous post. It is endless and uncontained, impossible to make any sense of. The irrational vibrations are only seen as irrational in the masculine because they are truths particular to a specific Being. It is a deep void of everything that cannot be caught and is beyond our practical senses.

The masculine reality, which is contained in the practical senses, offers conditions of stability that allow the particular Being to be the act of being-in-the-world, a house, a place where what is stored in the Being is executed.

I think of my work in data analysis. When we work with data, we are presented with a blank screen. The data is stored, and each part would be seen as irrational if it stood alone. Only when it is output do we get columns molded together to tell a story. But how do we draw out the data in a particular way? We do this through a query. By asking the system a specific question, we get an answer. However, that is intentional. What about the unintentional, the serendipitous act that creates a moment we did not calculate?

I have mentioned this before, but I began writing monthly letters, which has grown to a group of about ten people. At first, I wasn’t quite sure why I was doing it, maybe to inspire others through a dying art,  but it seems I have continued doing it for the past six months, and who knows how long it will go on for.

I was discussing free association with my friend Javier Rivera, which is the act of expressing whatever comes to mind in the moment. I realized my letters are like this. I have my own rules for when I write.

1.) When the feeling strikes during that month, I must sit down and write it out.

2.) When I write a letter, I try not to think about it too much, and through free association, I let the feeling take over and let the rationality be in the symbols, the handwriting. Sometimes, what I write is bonkers, silly, encouraging, nostalgic, tender. Sometimes there’s a story, sometimes a prayer. Whatever it is, it’s there, pulled out of me with a simple pen and paper…and stickers. I like stickers.

3.) I read it over once, and only edit a few grammatical things. I seal it up and then put it in the mail, saying, “It’s in God’s hands now.” And truly, it is.

The next thing to do is simply forget. For that is the nature of the serendipitous gift. It is meant to be something that seems to appear out of thin air, like it was never meant to be planned, but somehow was always there. As I never know exactly when I’m going to write a particular person or what I’m going to say, it almost becomes a surprise even to me. And yet what I write was always dormant within me, even the silliest, the tenderest of things. I just didn’t realize, until I forgot I was writing.

What happens when God unfolds the world? His miracles seem like moments created by chance, chances, paths, doorways that appeared out of nothing, but what if it wasn’t nothing at all?

What if the unexpressed feminine is thrown into the expressed masculine reality through a match? Like a positive and negative charge that gives a spark? What if, when the intensity of a possibility unexpressed in the feminine meets the intensity of what is expressed in the masculine, BOOM, a serendipitous creation?

But I wonder if there is one more step to this serendipitous, happy accident. We know that we consciously say 2 + 2 = 4. That is easy. What we cannot consciously do is say, “If I take two steps, and one step back, if I turn to the right today instead of the left because I just had this strange feeling I couldn’t express, then I’ll miss the car accident and make it home safe in bed.” That would seem like a miracle, right? Maybe it’s something different, an unconscious apprehension of patterns that could not be expressed in reality until after that miracle occurred. Even then, how would one logically explain that they just happened to miss that accident? It would be impossible! Took two steps forward and one step back? What does that even mean to someone who is not you?

I believe that serendipity, a miracle from God, is a calculation that is unconscious of itself, as if it is asleep. It just looks like nothing to us because even though it’s all there, it’s like it’s stuck in a dream. Only when we don’t think too much about whether 2 + 2 = 4, only when we begin to lead with that unexpressed irrational gut feeling, can God write the query needed to pull it out into reality.

And those letters? I’d make jokes about being a jester or fairy, setting out to give random gifts to inspire with kind words and silly stories.

But as it turns out, those people were the ones who inspired me; they were the serendipitous queries that yielded life-changing events for me. And I will forever be grateful to them, as they have helped bring out the beautiful, unexpressed parts of me.