Happenstance and Serendipity

 Are the kinds of words that an ex-lexicographer might use, out of vanity or awkwardness, or even clarity.  But as they are slightly away from the centre of vocabulary, I will append definitions:

happenstance (noun) - a chance occurrence; a situation that happens by accident or coincidence. 

serendipity (noun) is the occurrence of finding valuable, agreeable, or pleasant things by chance in an unexpected, fortunate manner. Coined by Horace Walpole in 1754, it is often described as a "happy accident" or the aptitude for making desirable discoveries, such as in scientific breakthroughs. 

I must confess I didn't even know that the second one was a coinage by a named person, but hey, every day is a day in school, and thank you very much, Horace. 

I want to talk about these two words, or rather the ideas behind them, mainly in the context of visting new places or even of finding new things in the place where you live. I have come across all sorts of H & S over the years and it doesn't seem to be stopping any time soon. I can give you two that came up in the last two months. 

Firstly, you remember that my sister Mary and I went to Serbia at Christmas, partly because we knew that there were a couple of Irish sessions there (!) but when we got there we found that not only were most of the lovely and talented Irish musicians actually Russians (who can get to Serbia more easily than to other European countries) but one of them had actually learned Irish, had been going to the same, tiny festival in Kerry that my sisters had also attended often over the last 10 years. And the kicker was that he had on his phone video of our sister sitting in the same fiddle class that he had attended! That, I think, can be surely described as an extreme form of happenstance. 

The rider on this, I suppose, is that if you are Irish or Irish-adjacent in some way there is a higher chance of meeting someone who has a connection with you. As a student I was working on a building site in Huddersfield and, forgetting all the warnings about "Two Irish people only need to talk for five minutes to find they are related", I did start chatting to the much older Irish ganger on the site and did indeed find that we were probably third cousins. 

But the Serendipity side of life is not limited to Irishness. The fact of stumbling on something wonderful that you had no plan or intention of finding is a great joy in life, a balm to the soul, a promise of all the mystery and realness that makes life great (and in passing, it is the very opposite of our online experiences where so much of what we see has been slid across to us by algorithms or is not real at all because it has been generated by AI). You turn a corner in a strange city and see a mural, a mosque, a market, a lovely doorstep domestic scene, and it makes your heart sing. My favourite recent 'just passing' experience was when Angie and I were over in Palermo and we found an off-the-beaten-track local bar which sold the fortified Sicilian wines of which we were completely unaware, and which were delicious. A whole social history just suddenly caught is and reeled us in. The picture at the top shows us being reeled in and the wine list itself. Zbibbo was my favourite!

Now to slightly theorize here - which I know is not always a good idea - I would like to give a nod to the wonderful, perceptive and frankly barking Irish podcaster called Blindboy (Blindboy podcast) . He is very much inclined to stream of consciousness and connections, but he also has a lot of things to link. His most recent podcast mentions the French philosophical concept (and practical activity) of 'Dérive'. Here is an explanation (Dérive) which simply involves a deliberately unplanned (if you can have such a thing) journey or walk, usually through an urban environment. The idea is to disrupt the plannedness of where you are, which in my trips I would subtitle 'where you are expected to go'. Following the path and desire lines of the city will be less likely to lead to Serendipity. A guided tour will remove the possibility completely (though each to their own, there is no law against predictabilty and stability). 

The theoretical framework is that we are -whether we perceive it or not - constrained and channelled by the urban environment to be good workers and consumers. Think Westfield shopping centre in East London; or then again don't think it if you are feeling frail. The city is designed for capitalist efficiency, and what I am looking for is illuminating inefficiency. And I love that feeling when suddenly a moment opens up in front of you and invites you in. 

And when I return from China I do hope I have more H & S to tell you about.