Serendipities Abound
Are they by chance or is there something more to it?
I have only been on the road again for just two weeks and happy coincidences have begun again, felicities. Do they happen because of my travel buddy, my red backpack named Felicity …or is there more to it than that?
I walked into my current Airbnb for Digital Nomads and immediately met Ronda, who offered me a bowl of freshly made vegetable soup. Ronda is a twenty year younger traveler whose story has some uncanny similarities to mine. She sold all her belongings, including her car, seven years ago and started traveling outside the US. She left her former home in Colorado, moved a few things to her daughter’s place in Maine, and bought a one way ticket out of the country. My home base was Kansas City, I sold all my belongings, including my car, moved a few things to my daughter’s house in Louisville, KY, and bought a one way ticket out of the country. She has been doing for seven years what I have been doing for about fourteen months, traveling alone with only the essentials and living in other parts of the world. We were both surprised to meet someone else in our mid - to - later years doing much the same thing. One major difference is that I am retired and she is still working.
Märtha, with whom I shared writing classes at a University in Topeka, Kansas many years ago, saw my Facebook posts and contacted me, suggesting we connect. She is now married with two children and living in Lisbon, Portugal. Next weekend she and her husband Nuno will drive to Coimbra and I will take a train there. They will show me the sights in Coimbra, and then we will go back to their place in Lisbon for a day before I return to Porto.
Ben from Adelaide, Australia, arrived here. During a long evening gathering, we connected on a shared love of The Man from Snowy River, the movie that drew me to ride a horse in the Snowy Mountains. I shared the story about my entrée into the group of Aussies on the horse trek (everyone else in the group of fifteen or more was from Australia) when a fellow recited a poem by Banjo Paterson, him reciting a line and me reading the next. Ben said he could recite the Banjo Patterson poem titled The Man from Snowy River on which the movie was based, from memory. It is three pages long in a book of poetry that I have. We cajoled him into reciting it then and there. He recited it perfectly in such a beautiful and dramatic way that I felt as if I was back around that fire in the Snowy Mountains. The room was silent when he finished.
Ronda and I made a video about what it is like to travel as older adults.
(I’m going to share it with you all in 3 parts, as it was a long, fruitful conversation.)
Yesterday there was a post on Facebook by the Trumansburg Conservatory of Fine Arts organization in Trumansburg, New York. It is the first time any post connected with that town has appeared on my Facebook feed. My multiple generations back great grandfather Abner Treman founded that town, shortly after the Revolutionary War. Our family has his sword. I joined the TCFA, mentioning my connection and in reply was invited to an event there as a member of the family now known as the Keepers of the Sword.
These are all fairly unremarkable examples of the small-world network. Some time ago, I wrote a Substack describing some far more dramatic serendipitous experiences.
In a chance encounter with strangers on the Camino, when one discovered I went to a Seminary in St. Louis, he quoted something a student from my Seminary had said during a gathering of students from four Seminaries. That someone was me, forty-seven years earlier.
When I was at the Taizé Community in the south of France ten years ago, I was in a group of ten people from other places in the world including one other person from the US, living in Hawaii. When we went around the circle introducing ourselves, she revealed that she had grown up in my hometown and gone to the high school across town from mine. My wife was a couple of years ahead of her, her cousin was in my class across town at my high school, and her brother married another classmate of mine.
I first made the connection with Trumansburg years ago when I heard someone mention a nearby town while we happened to be riding the same tram in Wiesbaden, Germany. I asked about Trumansburg, and a woman answered that she was from there. The connection was made and only then did the town become aware that the sword existed.
I sometimes wonder if these things are completely random or there is some dynamic influencing, if not causing, them.
I am just asking questions. I am not presuming to have answers.
(That is above my pay grade!)
Has Consciousness emerged spontaneously through billions of years from the matter and energy spewed out at the Big Bang? If so, is what we experience as consciousness the ultimate and final version of it, or does the Universe itself have sentience? If so, does it have some sort of identity and will? Does it manage, or even micromanage, the individual forms of life in the Universe, Us?
This seems far fetched, in fact, silly. I don’t think it is so, but so many things that could not have been so at one point in the journey of discovery have actually emerged when finally there was a way to measure them, words to talk about them, tools to catch sight of them. When explanations are annoyed by anomalies, when the math doesn’t work, glimpses of something new cracks the answers open to reveal new questions. The rules of Newtonian Physics have an itch that needs to be scratched when at the Quantum level the rules don’t seem to work. And then, in a search to unify it all, are the quanta actually made of strings or clumps?
What about quantum entanglement, the bits of what makes up matter and energy seem to be entangled with one another. Tickle one and its twin feels it and laughs no matter how far apart they are. Are coincidences, is serendipity, a macro version of a Quantum reality?
I am not claiming it to be so. I am just enjoying living with the question.
Some mathematicians are clear that nothing is random, everything is determined by the math. In an interview one very respected mathematician who insisted that everything is determined by the math of the Universe and cannot escape it, that there is no free will, quipped that perhaps some day we will meet a race far more evolved than we, who says, “We used to think that way.”
I loved that nod to the possibility that our answers might be wrong.
I will stick with the questions. Yes, it is the easy way out, but, again, the answers are way above my pay grade.
Peter
I concur with those in the "this is so much more than serendipity" camp." Whether the mathematics of the universe or a few degrees of separation, what I observe is that there is an order to what happens beyond our abiilty to grasp and comprehend. So, I embrace these glad surprises with gratitude and expect to find more as we continue on our various journeys and paths. The miracles, magic and mysteries of life as we have come to know and love it. Yes?
Hello Peter Tremain: I may be a lot like you in many ways, but I don't travel. I used to move around a lot, both nationally and internationally when I was a salesman. But back then I got paid for it, and I wanted to see if I could "make that sale".
Now I am running the experiment to divorce location from personal satisfaction. That extrapolates to every location is just fine, which also means no other locations but this one, are necessary either. (I like where I live too, which may help a lot.)
I have had my personal share of serendipity, and I have recognized all of them. I guess they are worthy of comment, even if you don't allow them to change much. Some of mine changed me forever. In the early 90's there was a book called the Celestine Prophesy. I am not suggesting to read it, although I read it multiple times.
In the book a guy was on a spiritual quest in Peru. He didn't know anything about it, why he was driven to it, nor what to do to make it happen. So he paid complete attention to every last person and occurrence along the way, and each occurrence guided his move on the next leg. He honored every last experience, and that was the unfolding of his life.
It was so amazing, that I realize, hey, I can do that right now. I sort of do that even today, but on Substack. The book was so incredible that there was no way to end it, no ending was possible. It had to keep going. So he completely wrecked it by writing a fantasy last chapter. I forgave him, because I realized serendipity has no ending.
Good to hear from you.
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