Never Underestimate The Power Of Serendipity

There must be many people who map their lives out from an early age, but I suspect most of us just stumble along, from pivot point to road fork, from the cradle to the end of the line.

We like to believe that we are in control of our own lives, but often, the path we travel just sort of happens to us.

Rather than being the makers of our own fate, we find that our “destiny” is simply the result of a series of random choices and small steps, each leading farther in an unanticipated direction.

There is an old anecdote about a grammar school boy who signs up for music lessons. Because he’s tall for his age and able to handle the reach of the slide, the instructor tries him out on trombone. The kid stays with it through high school, since there is a certain status attached to band, and he gets to play the dances and travel to all the games.

In college, an engineering student, he keeps up with music, because gigs are an easy way to make a few dollars on weekends. He joins the musician’s union and picks up the odd club or recording date on his way to a bachelor’s degree. After graduation, because of a slip in the job market, his musical training and experience get him the only steady money he can find.

And one day, in his mid-30s, he wakes up and says, “My God, I’m a trombone player …”

I think our lives happen to many of us just that way.

On a flight to San Francisco, I was sitting next to an off-duty stewardess heading to her next shift. She said that she had been a flight attendant for three years. She’d had a short career in musical theater and dance in Chicago after college, but between shows she answered an airline employment ad and ended up working at 30,000 feet. She met a male flight attendant, they married and started a family.

Intending to stay home and raise her baby in Southern California, she will work a few more months until the airline cutoff date for pregnant women.

“So,” I asked her, “could you have imagined five years ago, dancing in a show in Chicago, that a few years later you would be married to a flight attendant, pregnant and settling down to suburban, full-time motherhood?” “Not in a million years,” she said.

I think that is how life develops for many of us. You take a step in a certain direction, that leads to the next step and a completely different series of doors to choose from. And like the trombonist or the stewardess, you find yourself somehow living a life that appears to be almost someone else’s.

T.E. Lawrence, better remembered as “Lawrence of Arabia,” started out as an architectural graduate student in Oxford. But he achieved fame blowing up railroads to Damascus during World War I.

Somerset Maugham wrote a short story about a man discharged from his janitorial position in a church because he couldn’t read. Walking home after being fired, and badly wanting a smoke, he thinks for the first time how well a tobacco shop would do along his route. So, he scrapes together all the money he has and opens one. By the end of the story he is a prosperous merchant, still illiterate.

When an astonished colleague asks him to think of where he would be if he could read, the man says he would still be working meekly for the church.

Another story, but this one true, is of Harlan Sanders, who, facing a retirement without much money, tried to sell his ace in the hole - a special way of preparing chicken - to restaurants.

After many setbacks and false starts, he ended up being the Kentucky Colonel of Kentucky Fried Chicken, selling his business for many millions of dollars. Had he saved more money during his prime working years, he might never have needed to try going into business.

Life must have been simpler in the days of the Gothic cathedrals, when you worked on a project that took at least a century to complete, when you were born knowing your role in life was to continue your father’s work, and to sire sons to continue yours.

The unexamined life is not worth living, Socrates said. Part of the examination should be the reconsideration of how we got where we are - looking, perhaps with irony, at the choices and innocent occurrences, the chance meetings, that pushed us along a road we thought we had selected ourselves.

Such a perusal might give us some ideas for changing direction and shaping the rest of our lives.

xxxx