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Primed For Serendipity

Listen to poem:

As luck would have it
I chanced upon the secret
of finding things not looked for,
to enlist serendipity on cue.

The more you look the less you see.
Stop looking for, and start looking about.
Expectation kills spontaneity.
So, stop planning itineraries.

If you take a planned tour
on a planned route to see
the things you quest for,
You'll only get what you ordered on the menu.

But if you look about
and see an opportunity
in an open door off the beaten track,
you are ready to allow chance 
happenings to surprise you.

Many great discoveries 
in Science were made this way:
Penicillin discovered in dirty dishes, after a vacation
The micro-wave oven, when chocolate bar in pocket melted 
Post-it note, a not so sticky glue
Velcro, when hiking and seeing how burrs hook onto hair
Radioactivity, when Uranium left on photo plate in drawer overnight.

Two things stand out here:
Firstly, doing something unusual, unplanned, as if by accident
Secondly, being aware that the unexpected has happened,
and taking time to investigate it.
An inquisitive mind feeds on serendipitous encounters.

The opposite of serendipity is *zemblanity:
Which is discovering unlucky expected outcomes you planned for,
when you make unhappy, unlucky and expected discoveries by design.
It is the inevitable unsurprising uncovering 
of what we expected, and would rather not know.

So now you know, it is better 
to look about, than to look for,
to allow serendipitous encounters 
to happen more by chance.

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9 May 2017

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