Always be on a quest

Serendipity.

Legend has it that a king sent his three sons in search of a magic formula to kill the dragons surrounding their home, the island once known as Ceylon, before that Serendip, and today called Sri Lanka.

Arriving in Persia, the three boys, disguised as regular citizens, are falsely accused of camel rustling. Their keen sense of observation so impresses their judge, who happens to be the local king, that he invites them to stay a while. The princes continue from one adventure to the next, always in search of the magic formula, forever seeing things that others don’t notice and becoming heroes for it. Sailing home through a sea of menacing dragons, the boys look up to see a giant golden bird that dumps the magic formula into the sea, saving the boys. The king is delighted when his sons reappear, having learned to take compassion on the poor and afflicted, and prepared to take on the responsibilities of being king.

“Serendipity is the quality, through awareness and good fortune, of being able to find something good while seeking something else,” writes Richard Ayre in a book inspired by the Persian fable in the paragraph above. (Spiritual Serendipity, 1999). “On one level, serendipity is the ability to notice what others miss – to observe and appreciate beauty, to sense needs and opportunities, to be receptive to impressions, intuitions, and insights. On a higher level, serendipity of the spirit is receptiveness to inputs beyond our senses – to the deeper nudges and inspirations that come to our hearts and our souls.”

Ayre writes that serendipity is a bridge between structure and spontaneity, between disciple and flexibility, between the expected and the unexpected, between plans and surprises, between relationships and achievements, and between the forced and the fun.

Serendipity is partly luck, what Abraham Lincoln described thus: “The harder I work, the luckier I get.” The other factor is always being on a quest, forever curious about how to make things better, living mindfully, and thinking visually.