Serendipity Now

It’s validating when no less august a publication than The New York Times (February 3) publishes a piece about the merits of unstructured discovery, a way of being I’ve been advocating, mostly unconsciously, my whole life. The Times Culture and Lifestyle editor Melissa Kirsch introduces us to Alastair Humphreys who became known for great adventures like rowing across the Atlantic but later developed the idea of bringing that curiosity to the backyard. Humphreys wrote that he “decided to treat everything as interesting.” People often say being happy is a decision. Why not being intrigued?

I love revelations that occur as unexpectedly as double rainbows. Now in a metadiscovery that coincides with a bout of pneumonia, I’m pondering how I came to be this sort of person. In breath, out breath. In breath, out breath. What does it all mean? It feels like putting a giant jigsaw together, one of those 1000 piece puzzles of the Champs Elysees or the Houses of Parliament. The entire image is starting to come into focus. I have discovered something about myself that had previously been hidden like the last piece in the upper righthand corner. I have identified my love of serendipity. Not just the occasional crumpled twenty dollar bill on the sidewalk, but the way life comes and goes when all the doors remain open. For example, when I go to the library, I do not have a book in mind. My method is to select a shelf, say third from the top to take my height into account, and wander the stacks. Eventually, something voluptuous and irresistible, Nabokov, Raymond Chandler, will appear on the third shelf and it will feel like that Oscar Hammerstein lyric about a stranger across a crowded room. When I discovered the French term flâneur (or flâneuse, in my case) I was delighted to unearth a word for the sort of person whose sole/soul purpose is to stroll around  and look at stuff. No destination, no plan, all potential. 

Photo by Aaina Sharma on Unsplash

This unstructured searching also applies to my shopping for clothing. Let me clarify. I do not shop for clothing, but, obviously shirts develop recalcitrant grease stains and pants spring holes in inconvenient places. Tag sales are the answer to this problem, but you can’t go out on a balmy Saturday morning in May with the thought of replacing the marmalade-colored cardigan that you bought from a woman you knew in Southfield, Mass. who sold her things shortly before she died. You have to be more open to the universe than that. You have to receive the majolica salad plates another sweetheart proffers even though you didn’t think you were in the market for dishes. She wants you to have them.

Frank has a theory about this open ended marketplace. He thinks I inherited it from my father, the dealer in antiquities. Sidney was a shopkeeper, a handler, who bought and sold stuff much like any other person in retail, but with this difference. Unlike someone in the shoe business, he never knew what he was going to buy or when he would run into it. Like Leopold Bloom in Dublin, my father would set out in Manhattan with no particular plan, just the desire to visit one of his favorite haunts, a hole-in-the-wall shop crammed with delectables that you had to wade through bravely, coming out with a tiny emerald glass vase and an overcoat covered in dust.

The opportunities for endless discovery are balanced by loss. In the economics of serendipity, it’s not just novels, sweaters and vases arriving. It’s also precious objects and precious people exiting. I can’t find my green chrysoprase ring that my brother-in-law gave me. This was my brother-in-law who I loved more than God. He was a brilliant, huge-hearted person who gave me this exquisite object on no particular occasion, for no particular reason. I wore it for more than thirty years, only taking it off to bathe or wash dishes. But in the midst of the havoc brought on by the pneumonia, the universe took my ring. It can’t have gone far, but then maybe it felt the urge to play the flâneur and wander off like Alastair Humphreys, to set out on a great adventure, to mingle with the dust motes. Maybe these tiny grains are related to the dust that fell on my father’s coat in the back of the shop where he found the vase, an emerald green much like the chrysoprase. And what is dust, really? It’s what we came from and what we’re going back to.

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Many Voices will appear on the last Sunday of each month and will feature contributions from the community of paid subscribers. In February, seventysomething is delighted to introduce Substack writer Jocelyn Lovelle who writes about the excruciatingly beautiful and heartbreaking human experience of holding the knowledge that we are both darkness and light—all the time. 

All subscribers are now welcome to read Many Voices posts. Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to support seventysomething, have access to the archives, and become a contributor to Many Voices. Your ideas are always welcome.

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Copies of my 2019 essay collection, Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement, are available directly from me (signed) or from Amazon or your local bookseller.

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