Intentional Serendipity
On finding what we do not seek.
Major life transitions (and minor ones, for that matter) involve grief: an ending, as it turns out, means that you must leave behind things that you’d rather hold on to. Whether you have chosen the change, or it has chosen you, you will inevitably miss certain aspects of what you are leaving.
During the period after a life transition, as I wrote about last week, we can find ourselves searching for reasons to validate our past decisions that led to this change—reasons that, in lonely or anxious moments, we can lean on to remind ourselves that we did the right thing. We can spend tremendous amounts of time looking for the confirmatory feeling that yes, I made the right choice; everything in my life has been leading to this.
The perspective that I arrived to was that waiting for something external to confirm that you have made a “good choice” is a guaranteed-to-be disappointing and exhausting way to live. I had given up the search for the “reasons why I moved to a new place” and then, I proceeded to stumble upon an extraordinary weekend in which I experienced many moments that I was hoping for, and many that I had not even thought to look for. Here, the saying “you’ll find it when you stop looking for it” is apt.
It is often true that the moments you do not plan or expect end up being the ones that are the most rewarding; the ones that you cherish the most. The most beautiful things do tend to find us when we least expect it, while the things we expect to be beautiful may very well not be. Planning to find something or someone we want does not usually work: our plans, in fact, might actually get in the way.
Kathryn Schulz, who writes my favorite memoir Lost & Found, explores ways we go about finding things we are and aren’t looking for. In her words, “finding something that we labored to locate makes us feel that the world is at least partly subject to our will: that we can exert ourselves to discover something, and that the discovery itself is a warranted reward for our work. By contrast, finding something by chance makes us feel that we are subject to the will of the world.”
Schulz brings us to one of my favorite topics: walking the line between intentionality and surrender. How much of our lives do we have the power to influence, and how much must we surrender to? It is true, sometimes, that we can go out looking intentionally for something and find it. Our minds, however, are greatly limited in imagining our futures: we do not have all the information yet, and we cannot actually predict what is to come, or how. Life will bring us things we want, many things we do not want, and still more that we did not even know we were hoping to find. We must ultimately surrender, always, to the flow and the forces of nature.
Schulz describes the feeling of finding something we were not necessarily looking for as such: “amazement, gratitude, wonder, awe: the feelings inspired in us by serendipitous finds are the same ones inspired in us by the cosmos as a whole, and for the same reason—because life gave us something splendid that we did not expect, did not ask for, and did not in any particular way deserve.”
Despite our lack of real control, we are not mere victims to the whims of life: we can be intentional, and stay open to serendipity. We can expect that unexpectedly delightful surprises will find us, just as unexpectedly devastating ones also will.
An overarching theme of Schulz’ memoir is that you cannot lose without finding, and you cannot find without losing. Welcoming in something new requires letting go of what is gone; letting go creates space for new things to find us, and for us to find them. We are here to experience many overlapping cycles of beginnings and middles and endings, all of which will bring things to us, and all of which will take things away. We have no real way of knowing what one beginning may cause us to lose, or what one ending may allow us to find, until we live it.
We will experience periods of loss and the accompanying loneliness, doubt, and despair. We will also experience periods of bountiful discovery, and the love, connection, and delight that comes along. For every moment we may want to reject, there is another one we want to cling to: neither pain nor joy can be avoided, if we are paying attention.
Maggie
Love the saying “ you cannot lose without finding, and you cannot find without losing”.