“What
is serendipity?”, said the handsome young Dutchman, opposite whom the waitress
had seated me. I didn’t dare ask him, myself, if I could sit at his table. He was
too good-looking, too blond, and too alone, to be approachable. It was the
waitress who decided I should sit at his table.
Serendipity, I hazarded, “is a coming together of random events that produces unexpected and
happy results. Our meeting,” I continued, “is serendipitous, because we are
discovering so many things in common, and the chances of us sitting at the
same table, in the same café, tonight, must have been very small.”
Going
with the flow
Have
you ever spent time in a Dutch Polder surrounded by water? The cows and the sheep
graze on the greenest squares of grass, and the herons flop from ditch to
ditch. High above the houses, cyclists and barges sail by. The sound of the
water lapping in the canal can be alarming if, like me, you are more used to
the noise of traffic. Why does the water from the canal not drain into the
fields, I asked? “Our dykes are extremely well built”, said my host.
Discovering
our purpose
Last
month, I spent a week living and working at Buitenwerkplaats, an architect
designed space for people who want to reflect, plan, create and do. You can
browse the books, interpret the art, and lose yourself in the watery landscape. The
furniture, like the food, is carefully curated.
Buitenwerkplaats encourages intimacy. Guests can float between indoor and outdoor spaces. Meals are tethered to tables under the trees, or moored to the boardwalk by the pool. There are no barriers between the people who work there, the groups who come for a week, and the guests who come for a day's thinking time. I connected with the lady who changes the beds, the poets who came to plan, and the couple who are writing their first novel together.
Buitenwerkplaats has a ‘sense
of place’ that I believe is key to helping people to connect with themselves,
and with each other. And in the process of making discoveries about ourselves
and other people, we may discover a sense of purpose. The
day after I left Buitenwerkplaats, I went to Anne Frank’s House in Amsterdam.
This is a quote from Anne’s diary that I read on the wall.
“I
know what I want, I have a goal, I have opinions, a religion
and
love.”
Anne
Frank, 11 April 1944
Later that day, I met the young Dutchman who asked me to define serendipity. Just like that.
Serendipity
I
didn’t mean to write this blog, today. I didn’t plan to go to yoga, this
morning. But I woke in time, splashed my face with water, and went with the
flow. And after we had breathed, and bent, and stretched, our teacher read
these words to us:
“Water
is fluid, soft and yielding. But water will wear away rock, which is rigid and
cannot yield. As a rule, whatever is fluid, soft and yielding will overcome
whatever is rigid and hard. This is another paradox: what is soft is strong.”
Lao-Tzu, Chinese philosopher
(604 BC - 531 BC)
And
I thought, serendipity. I need to write this blog today about embracing fluidity and making connections and discoveries that I hadn’t looked for. And I
hope it will make sense to all the wise people who, quite by accident, inspired
me to write it.
2-3
September 2013
Oxford
Online Definition of Serendipity
The occurrence and development of events by chance in a happy or
beneficial way
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’
