In Search of Serendipity 

Wow, this year has been a lot. In every conversation with a colleague, it seems we’re talking about workload, institutional turbulence, the roller coaster of extreme weather, and/or the state of the world. I feel like I’m alternating between a head-down-and-muscle-through mindset and a frazzled lack of focus edging on burnout. Seeking some kind of mental reset, I’m thinking back on a conversation I had a few weeks ago. 

I’ve mentioned before (like here and here) that my colleague and I co-host a podcast, “From Concept to Creation: Uncovering the Making of Scholarly and Creative Accomplishments.” The idea of the podcast is that we talk with folks from our institution about the process of their research and inquiry experiences — the steps they took in a research project or on a professional path and the practices, attitudes, and skills they used or developed along the way. The goal is to peek behind the curtain to reveal the parts of this work that are so often invisible (and undervalued), to increase the transparency and therefore the accessibility of these experiences, and to normalize the challenges and roadblocks that we inevitably encounter along the way. (You can check it out on Spotify and Apple Podcasts, if you’re so inclined.) 

We’re putting together the lineup for season 4 this summer so we’ve been having exploratory conversations with potential guests. We use these meetings to get to know folks and their work and to brainstorm if and how we might structure an episode around their experiences. It’s a thread from one such conversation that keeps coming to mind for me. In reflecting on his professional progression, one potential guest commented on the social and societal pressures to define life paths from an early age. He characterized his own journey as loose and amorphous, encouraged by his parents to live in the moment rather than establish a clear trajectory or goal. This approach, he felt, allowed him to take advantage of the opportunities he encountered, to veer off course you might say. By contrast, he noted, the kind of pressure so many young people feel to focus early, to identify a dream job or find a passion, narrows their perspectives. Serendipity is missing from so many people’s lives, he said — being open to the world around us reaps great rewards personally and professionally. 

I can see what he means. Too narrow a focus reduces opportunities for unexpected discovery. But not just the opportunity — also the attitude. When our lives are increasingly governed by algorithms, for example, not only is our exposure to unanticipated information limited but our confirmation bias is also exacerbated. And it seems to me that when the workload or the world (or both) are overwhelming, when we feel overloaded or uncertain, it’s natural to close off, to make ourselves small. With that comes a reluctance to engage with the opportunities around us, or even the inability to see them as opportunities — to see them as inconveniences or even threats instead. 

My podcast work is a kind of exercise in serendipity, come to think of it. On the one hand, there’s no real external mandate for me to do this project (that adds to my workload). So by committing to it (and sometimes taxing my capacity), I’m likely limiting my ability to see and engage in the other opportunities around me. At the same time, though, the podcast creates the opportunity to participate in the types of meandering conversations I really don’t have anywhere else in my professional life and with people I wouldn’t otherwise encounter. I would have had no reason to have had this rather fun and thought provoking conversation with our potential guest, or even to explore the train of thought that led me to discover his work. Time and time again, when my collaborator and I wonder why we keep giving ourselves this work, it’s this idea that we come back to: we find so much inspiration in it. 

It strikes me then that maybe serendipity isn’t actually as happenstance as it sounds. It can take intention to make it happen. Maybe we have to build a structure to create space for it, seek it out — whether that means carving out time and mental space by adding a new project to our to-do lists or just adding a regular block on our schedules to read at random or follow a meandering thought and see where it goes. 

How do you search for serendipity? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.