meaningful serendipity

I often ascribe meaning to events or situations because, well, I guess I’m a human searching for meaning (an homage to a psychology hero Victor Frankl). I’ll admit that the ascribed meaning may not always be justified, but nevertheless the meaning is there. As further explanation to this, I also believe in God and often see God’s interaction in my life. However, I don’t think that God rules over every single detail of my life, so this further challenges what deserve meaning. To further confuse the issue, I often question terms like chance or luck, and find other words like fate and destiny to attribute the possibility of God’s interaction.

All of this is coming up because yesterday I had a random encounter with a good friend. My boss and I decided to run an errand and grab lunch at a little Thai place. While running the errand I ran into J, a previous co-worker who has also become a good friend. I had seen him a few weeks before at his graduation ceremony, and I’d been thinking about him a lot, but our schedules haven’t allowed us to get together to catch up for quite awhile. He ended up joining us for lunch, and while it was great to see him, I am marveling more at us even meeting. Neither of us frequent our meeting place; he was picking up a tux for a friend’s wedding, and if I were a mathematician and I could figure out probability formulas, I’m sure the odds of us meeting in the couple of minute window in this random location would be huge. Later when I told my roommate the story she quickly attributed the meeting as fate; I pointed out that although I could believe it was fate, J most likely would say it was a coincidence. She responded with the statement men are afraid of fate. As I thought about it, we all are a bit fearful of things we don’t understand, especially when it appears our freewill is taken away.

In my ponderings of these different terms I latched on to “serendipity”. I love that word; apparently I’m not alone, according to Simon Singh a British mathematician, Britain’s voted serendipity their favorite (or should I say favourite) word in 2000. In 2001 the movie Serendipity gave those of us who buy into sappy romantic tales hope that destiny will prevail in romance. But there’s a difference between a movie and real life… right? Serendipitous events make for great stories, but I have a hard time thinking they are anything more than fiction… well mostly. There in lies the dilemma: my rational mind can’t accept fate, destiny, or serendipity, while my spiritual/emotional mind, or maybe better phrased my heart believes beyond a shadow of a doubt they exist. I guess you could say, I’m two people in one body. My training taught me to only embrace truth proven empirically. But then there is the truth that my heart knows that requires faith. So I guess I will continue attaching meaning to things in my life and wonder about the validity of their meaning. And I guess time will tell if my meeting with J was mere coincidence, or fateful serendipity.