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nbagaria's picture

Allowing for serendipity?

Submitted by nbagaria on Thu, 10/01/2009 - 1:09am.

 

 
The word( serendip ) derives from Swarnadip, the Sanskrit language name for Sri Lanka,[2] and was coined by Horace Walpole on 28 January 1754 in a letter he wrote to his friend Horace Mann (not the same man as the famed American educator), an Englishman then living in Florence. The letter read,
"It was once when I read a silly fairy tale, called The Three Princes of Serendip: as their highnesses traveled, they were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of: for instance, one of them discovered that a camel blind of the right eye had traveled the same road lately, because the grass was eaten only on the left side, where it was worse than on the right—now do you understand serendipity? One of the most remarkable instances of this accidental sagacity (for you must observe that no discovery of a thing you are looking for, comes under this description) was of my Lord Shaftsbury, who happening to dine at Lord Chancellor Clarendon's, found out the marriage of the Duke of York and Mrs. Hyde, by the respect with which her mother treated her at table."
(Source: Wikipedia)
   Thus, from the above definition, it seems to me that serendipity is nothing more than luck or good fortune. However, it is not fortune that one is expecting or waiting for.
   If I judge my life according to this interpretation then I can safely say that most of my life cannot be described as “serendipitous”, for I have waited for good fortune to come my way. I waited for college, I waited for my final grades, I waited with bated breath to see if I would be accepted into Bryn Mawr and now I am waiting for so many other things to come my way. Yet, even in my state of “non-serendipity” I have always been “serendipitous” as I was neither expecting to get into Bryn Mawr nor hoping that I would be able to achieve anything that I had set out to do. So, the very word is ambiguous and maybe even slightly deceiving as almost everyone is waiting for good luck without believing that they will ever have it. Maybe, being “serendipitous” is a part of who we are. So, allowing for serendipity is essentially allowing us to be ourselves, to be human. This makes me wonder, is there really anything as allowing for serendipity? Aren’t we all already “serendipitous”?

 

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