Serendipity, Synchronicity, or Luck?

(Speaking of serendipity, a friend Googled me and found that I was a selected entry for a contest at HappyNews.com. I didn’t win the $1000 prize, but am still optimistic about the future (the theme of the contest!).

I feel lucky this week. My mother, brother, and sister all got good news, a mixed bag of good fortune involving improved health, enhanced wealth, and creative opportunities. My work week was a nice mix of research, writing, and camaraderie. I got a precious window to write on Tuesday night and milked the hell out of it. Life is good.

I’ve been thinking about synchronicity this week. Having been an 80s teenager, I hear the tune Every Breath You Take from the Police album Synchronicity whenever I hear the word. So I struggled to get Sting’s throaty voice out of my head while I contemplated the concept at the Paperback Café.

It often happens that I have a sudden, limited opportunity to write, and a 5-minute window in which to grab something to write on (still haven’t fully integrated the laptop concept). I run down the basement stairs, or up to my bedroom, and grab one of multiple blank books, or even an unbound sheaf of paper with some scribbled pages at the top. If my journals were a barometer of my potential creative success, I’d be doomed. My writing is never in one place. It is on the computer, it is on a disk at the bottom of a bag, it is in one of the blank books but not in any linear fashion. Whatever I pick up gets written on or in, with no logic or forethought. Hopelessly scattered; emblematic of the chaos theory (more on that later).

Synchronicity, in case you are also distracted by Sting’s voice in your head, is the temporal incidence of 2 or more events linked together by meaning, without any causal connection (Webster's Dictionary). Synchronicity comes alive when when I write.

For me, synchronicity is running into something or someone seemingly random who is practically holding a sign that says Count your blessings. Pay attention to your thoughts. Look how far you have come. Look at the potential you can tap. Case in point: the Paperback Café. I grabbed an artist’s sketchbook before I ran out the door that night. The gilded pages drew me, plus the fact that I hadn’t grabbed this particular diary in ages. As my black coffee cooled, I perused what I had written. I was still at my former high-pressure job for my last entry, and Gavin was still not quite at peace with the potty concept. I thought, you’ve come a long way baby. I paged back in time to read a writing exercise I had completed from Vinita Hampton Wright’s The Soul Tells a Story (I have been meaning to write to her; her middle name is my maiden name. Synchronicity again?). Wright says: From the moment we are born, our souls are spinning stories and gathering wisdom. Well, I was reading my soul’s wisdom back, something I needed to do in the midst of a happy but hectic week. Those exercises, completed at a retreat nearly a year ago, spoke to me about possibility, reminding me of sketchy ideas now ready to be fleshed out.

The dates in the diary got closer and closer to anniversaries of the current date. April 22, 2001: I wrote Friday night was sad – I had a negative pregnancy test. I think that Tom didn’t know what to say or do. The universe again screamed that I was blessed. Loose pages from a different journal, April 7, 2002, were randomly stuck in by the sad entry. I wrote about my first out-of-state trip away from Gavin – just a short ferry ride to New York to bring my niece home. I was swollen and sore from lack of nursing for several hours, and fretting about my baby across the Long Island Sound. On the way back, I relaxed into it and had my first tentative admission that I could balance time away with being a good mother. How far I have come from that negative pregnancy test, and from those first nervous months of motherhood! I chuckled to myself when I saw the date on the diary’s inside cover. April 4, 2001. I had picked up the journal I started five years ago to the day. Things like this happen all the time.

I have always gotten synchronicity and serendipity confused. Serendipity is the faculty of happening upon or making fortunate discoveries when not in search of them (Webster's again). So it is more of a happy accident than a perception of meaningful convergence. Still, they go together nicely. I am fully aware that cynics would sneer even at the title of today’s blog, but I happen to like the idea of stumbling about rather haplessly and then stepping into good fortune. I even believe that God puts events and people in my path at regular intervals.

Back to chaos theory: one Web site remarks that chaos theory is really about finding the underlying order in apparently random data. So, to me and apparently to some much more physics-friendly folks, chaos is not really as chaotic as it seems. There is order to be found. Sort of like the piles of paper on my desk (I can always extract the right reference from the seeming black and white abyss) or my crazy quilt of journals.

And then there is luck. I have always hated the axiom We make our own luck. It makes unfortunate people sound so lazy! But the flip side of that for me is the constant presence of opportunity (knock, knock). Damn Interesting has a great article on Professor Wiseman, who did a 10-year study on the nature of luck. He looked at the lottery winnings from people who consider themselves lucky as compared with people self-described as unlucky, and affirmed that your perception of luck before a lottery has no relationship to winning (I can attest to that: I am invariably convinced I will win!). On the other hand, people who were supposed to be counting photographs in a newspaper, if they viewed themselves as lucky, were much more likely to notice a disguised message on page two: STOP COUNTING–THERE ARE 43 PHOTOGRAPHS IN THIS NEWSPAPER. Wiseman concluded that a major part of one's good fortune is due to one's state of mind and behaviors. In other words, luck has a lot to do with psychology.

I spend all week scrutinizing randomized, double-blind, controlled medical trials, seeing whether the statistics really prove a theory beyond random chance, and whether the study was adequately powered. And in Dr Wiseman’s case, I haven’t read his book. I have no idea whether he is a fruitcake, or a self-fulfilling prophet. But you know what? For matters of the soul I suspend this scientific approach. My own experiences, some of them decidedly not rosy, have proven to me that openness to the lessons of circumstance brings good things.

I only realized recently that I surround myself with like-minded people. (My closest friends totally “get” the whole no coincidences mindset, and even frame particularly trying situations as fraught with potential opportunities). Am I another self-fulfilling prophet? Perhaps. But I have created a new equation, which should make me seem more legitimate. Coincidence + insight + faith + openness + optimism = synchronicity + serendipity + luck. No matter how you parse the equation, it all adds up to me.