Roads to Joy

I’m a great fan of serendipity, of synchronicity less so. Serendipity, it seems to me, implies a grasp of something that can be used creatively, while synchronicity is more of a retrospective observation of a chance encounter.

So when we remark on something that has happened that seems so, well, remarkable, in fact what we’re observing is a statistical inevitability: chance encounters that seem meaningful are a component of our human consciousness, and often the way we make stories and anecdotes for ourselves. In a similar way, take any two random dots and if there’s a chance of finding a face associated with them, like a stray nose line or a curve that might indicate a smile, we’ll be looking more closely. As I say, inevitable.

What really matters, it seems to me, is what we do with a serendipitous opportunity. We might not even recognise it, and so the serendipity might evaporate before it’s exploited. Alexander Fleming might have thrown away his ruined bacterial culture, on that famous petri dish, had he not stopped and considered the remarkable opportunity that a passing fungal spore had afforded him. Thanks, Penicillium chrysogenum!

We moved into our new home village a couple of years ago, tentatively at first, and then for real. We had a serendipitous experience on one of our first tours of the place, when the secretary of the town hall spied us looking at the Asset Transfer notice and skipped over to chat with us, and then to take us through the ancient building. Since we’re involved in a volunteer capacity now, in several activities with the hall, we seem to have built on that serendipitous introduction.

We didn’t know, either, that the house we’d had our eye on ever since we saw the For Sale notice, was right next to a music composer and choir conductor Nor did I appreciate how a spontaneous poem of mine, in which I waxed enthusiastically about clearing jackdaw twigs from the town hall clock tower, might find resonance with our neighbour.

But one poem led to another, and then on to a more expanded brief, and suddenly I’m taking a bow in front of an audience clapping with enthusiasm at the end of The Fall of Man, our neighbour’s oratorio which we’ve been rehearsing these past months. Not one but two vicars had kindly read my recitatives, and our kind neighbour wanted to acknowledge my humble contribution.

What’s more, in that restless way that a vacuum tends to demand filling, we moved on to further fertile ground, and have been working together on a longer operatic/musical version of a classic Old Testament story, an archetype or two that bear revisiting again today. And the music for that project was finished a fortnight ago, though the general narrative, and a variety of treatments for the fifteen or so scenes, had been out of my hands for a month or so before.

When I came to transcribe the actual lyrics from the musical score, I found so much of my original effort embedded within them, and of course, that discovery felt most humbling too. The transcription is with the printers now, for a little private printing of the book of the musical, the actual lyrics, which I’ll hope to present to the composer in another fortnight.

To my mind, we can trace this project back to the serendipitous experience of volunteering on the town hall clean-up. So my continuing advice, mostly to myself but happy to share, is to grasp opportunity with alacrity, because you never really know when serendipity is on offer, and transcendence may be just around the corner.

I guess the final transcendence might could arrive at our doorstep when we sing the musical together, the musical that I contributed to, and for which, even through my chagrin, I might be urged to take a bow for words I’d never thought I’d ever write.

If the audience likes them, of course! That would be the challenge of creativity, wouldn’t it.