Sweet Serendipity
We used to call our staff meetings “Happy Accidents” because the best stuff almost always happened around all the important stuff I had planned. We tripped over it when our paths crossed walking in and out of the room.
Small talk in the doorways often led to big ideas. And afterthoughts in the hallway or in the parking lot on the way to the car frequently paved the way to simple solutions that seemed impossible to find inside the room. The edges of our meetings proved more fertile than the middle ever was. All I had to do was call the caucus, sweet serendipity did the rest.
I was never a “meeting freak”. Our staff met when we needed to discuss things. We met when we needed to re-direct. We met when we needed to come up with something together that none of us could come up with on our own. We met when it felt like the engine was sputtering and the tank needed fuel. But meeting just for the sake of meeting? We didn’t do that (even though the administration advised us that we should.) We met when there was a reason to, not because it was time.
However, the spoils that come from human collisions cannot be denied.
Two plus years of working remotely have trimmed a lot of unnecessary fat from our working world. We’ve learned that almost all jobs outside of manual labor and the service industry can be done from just about anywhere. Your couch, your backyard, a coffee shop, the beach, the mountains, Australia. Computer screens provide conduits for information, so everything we need is at our fingertips. Literally. And the perks are everywhere! Needy co-workers don’t interrupt us, we don’t waste time on what to wear, and we don’t exchange years of our lives on a two (or four or six!) hour round trip commute. Technology continues to pinch hit with brilliance. It saved us when we had to have it, and we may never go back to things the way they were. But it’s also stolen happenstance.
That might be a shaky trade.
The core of our fan base at Oklahoma grew from happenstance. Ron’s seats were across from John’s who were next to Mary’s who were behind Debbie who was across the aisle from Sue. And now they all go to breakfast together at a place run by another guy who had tickets three rows back. A common cause brought them to the same place at the same time then serendipity got involved. And now they’re all tangled up in each other’s grandkids and they know each other’s neighbors. That could never have all happened had they only watched our games on their tvs.
A common cause brought them to the same place at the same time then serendipity got involved. And now they’re all tangled up in each other’s grandkids and they know each other’s neighbors.
Sometimes it’s not the person, specifically, but simply the interaction with another human that gives serendipity an opening to get in. Maybe you don’t become travel buddies or develop a deep symbiotic relationship, but a brief human interaction can open a corridor of thought or knock some things loose inside of you that were stuck and growing stuck-er by the day. When we run into one another, energy is exchanged. Sometimes it’s depleted, sometimes it’s beefed up. But human encounters in and of themselves create a playground where happy accidents can occur.
We all have people in our lives that we really can’t remember how we met. It just seems like we’ve always known them. I can think of five of my favorites right now. These are serendipitous friends. People that the wind blew in while we were lucky enough to be walking around outside. Or we wind up in jobs or lifestyles that we love but never could have imagined, and we try to trace back why. Often, it happened because we went somewhere on a whim and struck up a conversation with a guy who knew a guy who had a place….and the next thing we knew we were buying cattle and ranching had become our way of life. That’s sort of how our time on earth unfurls: we move around and trip and fall on people, things, and places that make us who we are.
Serendipity doesn’t discriminate. But it’s hard to be the recipient of its graces when we’re locked behind a screen. Zooming has a place in things; it kept us moving when we literally couldn’t, and it’s more than proven its worth. But it’s certainly not a substitute for being in the same room. So much humanity gets lost through the pixels of a screen. But beyond that-- beyond the body language and the warmth of a handshake or a hug, or the feel you get from another person when you’re breathing the same air--lies opportunity that gets created when you simply share a space.
Accidents. We can sometimes help the happy ones happen, just by calling a meeting whether we really need one or not.
Sherri Coale
P.S.