Controlled Serendipity?! 

Monday, June 24, 2024

Serendipity 

From Oxford Languages:

Synonyms: Chance, boon, fortune

Origin

1754: coined by Horace Walpole, suggested by The Three Princes of Serendip, the title of a fairy tale in which the heroes ‘were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of’.

I am in a funk. A major one. Life doesn’t feel right, I can’t seem to write about any of it, and am sitting here holding my breath waiting for the inevitable shoe drop so that I can harness the adrenaline that comes with crisis and bang out some sort of written piece, either for my personal journal or my anonymous blog.

 I sometimes turn to quotes from authors to try and snap me out of a writing funk. “Write hard and clear about what hurts.”- Ernest Hemingway. Being an avid journal writer, I have been writing about what hurts for most of my life. Often it ends up in the trash, or in a campfire while I try to let go of the emotional pain I am attempting to release. I decided to start putting short pieces out there into the world in the form of a blog so that I could share my thoughts with people who may be going through the same things I am experiencing. The benefit to me being that once I commit something to the page, it has an external home and I don’t carry it as heavily in my mind. Also, the blogging process is great because as I write more and more, I am able to simultaneously categorize and take a broad view of my life and thought patterns. Emphasis on thought, avoidance of feelings – that’s me in a nutshell. 

Lately, I have been starting drafts in my head but none of them have formed into a neat and tidy narrative. I’m in a strange place of transition in every single area of my life. I have the sensation that I am drifting along at the mercy of whatever force is in charge of this existence of mine, be it fate or chaos or a mix of the two, and I have no idea what choices to make. Being an avid overthinker, it is easy for me to spiral up and down; being an ADHDer, it is easy for my spirals to end up with branches that spiral off in their own chaotic directions. As the brilliant Kurt Vonnegut says in his novel Slapstick, “My brother said this to him, tapping his own forehead with his fingertips: ‘If you think this laboratory is bad, you should see what it’s like in here.’” Seriously, you don’t want to see what the inside of my head holds. My therapist recently gave me some homework to do, to get all of the workings of my mind and demands on my time onto the page in a visual template. I am resisting. I don’t want to see it. I don’t want to think about it. The center will not hold. 

I scold myself mercilessly. All the time. Lately, with this writer’s block, I chastise myself for even bothering to blog because who the hell wants to hear my thoughts and who do I think I am even putting this out there into the world for nobody to read?! I remind myself of this: “Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.”- Cyril Connolly. Being an avid control freak (is there any other kind?) I convince myself that when I am spiraling and floating in emotional freefall, I do have the power to choose a spiral and write about it for myself, but even that hasn’t helped lately. I’m keeping all of this garbage inside and it needs some release. If one person reads it and relates to it, all the better, but clearly I need to shake things up. 

One of my general life strategies is to infuse the mundane with a little planned serendipity. Yes. Planned serendipity is just what it sounds like, an attempt to control the uncontrollable. It’s an interrobang term for sure, and it’s just the way my brain works. Constantly fighting itself and ignoring everything else that makes me human. One of my favorite things to do while doom scrolling is to peruse lists of books – there are endless lists online categorized in any which way you can imagine. Sometimes a title or a topic will stand out and I will put a hold on it through the public library. The wait could be days, weeks, or months, but eventually I get a notification that it is there waiting for me. Often I have forgotten the topic or the reason it appealed to me, and sometimes I don’t even get around to reading it. This week, though, the perfect book came to me at the perfect time. 

Using the public library as a means of infusing some planned serendipity into life led me to a book called “What you are looking for is in the library” which is a novel by Michiko Aoyama. It was written in Japanese and translated by Alison Watts. Just the title seems to indicate that using the library the way I do is a solid choice. Nice! The fact that it is by a Japanese author indicates to me that I likely found it on a list of things to read if you love the books of Haruki Murakami, which I do. He is famous for magical realism, which speaks to my heart, but I am hoping that there isn’t any of that in this novel. I feel like what I need right now has got to be grounded in practicality and reality. 

I don’t want to spoil the story, and the point of this post is not to retell it but rather to share my delight in the universe providing exactly what I needed, when I needed it, through the avenue of controlled serendipity. The structure of the novel is the telling of five separate stories of five different people. Each one is at different phases of their career and they share the common element of feeling stuck, trapped, hopeless, and they are longing for change or meaning. They each end up consulting the same librarian and their stories overlap somewhat by chance. They each go in to ask for specific books on practical topics that they feel will bring some order to the chaos they are feeling. 

In each case, the librarian simply asks “What are you looking for?” and the internal response of each character is to define what they are looking for emotionally and spiritually in a concise manner.  Their outer answer, of course, is to ask for recommended books on the practical topics that they think will change their lives. In each case, the list of books provided by the librarian contains an outlier that seems to have zero bearing on what they have asked for, but ends up shifting their perspective just enough that they experience significant personal and emotional growth. Each person is looking for a practical, useful way to move forward, but finds that it is only with the heart that one can be moved enough to make changes that ripple throughout their, and each other’s, lives. Serendipitous storytelling at its finest. Interrobang material because I have been thinking that I need practical direction from my head but I have been ignoring, stifling, and criticizing the stirrings of my heart for so long that I didn’t even consider it while trying to find a way forward through this writer’s (and frankly full on life) block. 

It is not my purpose to review this novel, and again, I don’t want to spoil it. The reason I wanted to put this out there is that I needed to hear this message even if I didn’t know it, and if it had not come to me in this coincidental manner I probably wouldn’t have paid it any mind. I have three bookcases of TBR (to be read) books and not much is able to break through the constant static and noise of my mind. I do highly recommend that you read it, but I also believe that the full impact will only be felt if it comes to you at just the right time in just the right way to break through the fateful chaos of life. I hope that this post might bring someone who needs the disruption of a little organized chaos, or controlled serendipity, in order to break out of a funk, whether it be writer’s block or something equally debilitating.