When I first ran into the word serendipity, I fell in love with it. It is such a beautiful word I thought, and symbolizes something very profound. This happened back in 2001 when a comedy by that name appeared with John Cusack and Kate Beckinsale in leading roles. The Merriam Webster dictionary defines serendipity as “the faculty or phenomenon of finding valuable or agreeable things not sought for”. A fluke. An agreeable, random phenomenon. A happenstance that in a singular moment forces our mind to recognize that there may be an occasional order to the madness it normally perceives as existence in this universe. This serendipitous moment, for a blink of an eye, makes the mind recognize there might even be, heaven forbid, some favorable nature to the order of the universe. And then, poof, we are back to the murkiness and away from this moment of clarity. Back to swimming in uncertainty and the mind’s perception of a less favorable universe, all depending on the degree of control we imagine we have or don’t have each moment.

And therein lies the rub.

The universe, as disorganized as it may appear to our meaning and order seeking egos, is always in order, always synchronized. It is just that our egos are not aware of anything but a fraction of a fraction of the total landscape and happenings, a pixel of the entire universal image and scenery. This design of the ego to only see a sliver of what is really going on at a time is designed so that we can maintain a modicum of control that will allow us to try and be at ease in a world that is out to eat us alive. Remember, we are humans, and as such, we belong somewhere in the middle of the food chain on this planet, and have only recently got to the top of the pyramid thanks to a fluke (read Terence McKenna’s food of the gods for one theory about how this came to be) but we are utterly unworthy of it judging solely by the immaturity of our egoic software. In such a dangerous world, narrowing your view to a sliver is important. It helps you identify risks and deal with them, but it is less conducive to witnessing or appreciating beauty. Think about arrow slits in medieval castles. They are great for defending the castle, but not really ideal for appreciating the panoramic views. It is from that slit that we make assertions and assumptions about the randomness of universal order. Surely, a very limited view. Serendipity is a word that epitomizes this very limited view as the ego is “shocked” to find out that things are actually in order, just before it forgets this again as it goes back to the arrow slit view until another “random” favorable moment comes along and strips the veil again for a few moments, and so on and so forth…

So what is the bottom line? There is no momentary serendipity. Everything is serendipitous. Everything is always in order, it is just not our mind’s concept of order, which is really about a yearning for ongoing control and avoidance of pain. The good news, practices of widening the slit and becoming more and more present to what is (here’s one) do make it better.