SERENDIPITY

..................................by Stanley

.....Delightful word, isn’t it? It dances off the tongue as though it enjoys life. And rightly so – ‘serendipity’ means chance events that have a happy outcome.
.....Wisdom tells us there is a time to plan and a time to let chance have a go. The value of planning and making goals is highly stressed in our action culture; but in some way we know that ‘letting things be’ can produce novel outcomes that are serendipitous in a way that the best laid plans would never even think of. Plans can disrupt serendipity, interfering where we would best let things fall out the way they would. Even in the middle of action there is a mode of letting things be.
.....Our fear is that in doing nothing, nothing will happen – or, that the worst will happen. So life becomes too active lest we will lose out. In Taoist philosophy the term ‘wu-wei’ means literally ‘nonaction’. Chuang-tzu says: ‘Nonaction does not mean doing nothing and keeping silent. Let everything be and allowed to do what it naturally does, so that its nature will be satisfied.’
.....We could note here straight away that one of the main characteristics of person-centred therapy is non-action on the part of the therapist. I always say that any success I have is not in what I do, but in what I don’t do! It’s not about doing nothing and keeping silent, but about allowing things to happen by themselves, about giving nature a chance. If I can give my client’s nature a chance then perhaps they too can learn to trust it.
.....But what is this nature we are giving a chance?
.....One of the main difficulties for many people in understanding Darwinism is the picture it paints of the complete lack of purposeful action in evolution. No one is controlling things or making plans. Organisms evolve by random, chance mutations, some of which are favourable. Over time, as a species gathers and keeps favourable changes, it becomes more complex and more adapted to survive. It moves forward by virtue of its own unintended variables, its heedless creativity, its accidental innovation. One variation may work – only then is it selected and retained. Not selected by the organism, but by the conditions of life it finds itself in. This has been called the principle of ‘blind variation and selective retention’
.....Bernard Shaw expressed a typical revulsion to Darwinism saying that there was a hideous fatalism about it, a ghastly reduction of strength and purpose, of beauty and intelligence, that made his heart ‘sink into a heap of sand’. And yet there is no question that this very process has produced the overwhelming variety of life on our planet, everything from viruses to dinosaurs, from daisies to redwoods, sardines to blue whales, from bacteria to Bach. And with the discovery of DNA, the process of Darwinian natural selection is no longer a theory, but as indisputable a fact as you can get.
.....There is no guiding hand in evolution, no supernatural intervention. Isn’t that a perfect example of ‘letting be’ in the best Taoist tradition? When nature is given the chance it does a spectacular job. It produced us didn’t it !
.....When we give the evolutionary principle a chance in our personal lives by letting something be the outcome can be quite serendipitous, so we call upon strange spiritual mystiques like ‘synchronicity’ or ‘laws of attraction’ that really explain nothing. But there is a very precise way natural selection works. The key idea is ‘piecemeal’ – a little bit at a time. Small steps.
.....In a risky and unpredictable world we ourselves are constantly changing, randomly – one could say we are ‘blindly variable’. So many aspects of our being are constantly shifting: our moods, hormones, digestion, infections, our judgements, needs, impulses, our values, loves and passing obsessions. If we are open to the world, the world seeks out our piecemeal variables and selects those that mesh with the world we live in, enabling us to go on. The world educates us; what it gives back is a validation of our unintended creativity – a reward for ‘letting be’ all our variables and clashing complexes. That’s why we feel serendipity ‘happens’ to us – as indeed it does.
.....Evolution is ‘a little bit at a time’, steps that are so small that I do not notice them. And the world is giving me feedback every moment, shaping me, slapping me when one of my ‘variables’ clash; and giving me a cuddle when I unknowingly get it right. And when I do get it right it tells me loud and clear with that lovely, warm feeling that good luck and fortune are on my side !