Sometimes serendipity finds you in spaces and times you aren’t expecting. The way we process and learn from these moments are individual to us all. Perhaps some look for signs, maybe from a god of theirs, or a lost love one, or the existence of aliens. Some of us may attribute it to mathematics, with The Littlewood’s Law of numbers calculating that each of us should approximately experience a one in a million chance event (which, by definition of law is considered a miracle) about once a month. I find this, yes, plausible, but also highly boring. Why do all the maths people try and ruin things all the time? Stick to Pythagoras’s theorem and let us have a bit of mystery for fucks sake. Some people don’t even pick up on the strange coincidences that go on in their lives, or just simply say “yeah, that was weird, wasn’t it?” Maybe Elon Musk is right and we’re all just living in a simulation, but serendipity for me will always spark imagination, hope and a little bit of theatricality into life.
ARTSerendipity | Leonid Afremov
The thing I love about serendipity is that the word captures a feeling, one that’s hard to describe, if not sometimes impossible to explain. When you experience it, sometimes it doesn’t seem as odd to the person you relay it to. It’s like a deep weighted-ness inside of you, mean’t for you, or perhaps for you and another, if you experience it together. It’s like a cooling, welcome mist of rain. What better platform to capture a feeling than art? Where words fail, sometimes colour and paint can tell a story. Here Leonid Afremov captures the meeting of two figures. Dark and distant, we have no idea what the meeting means to the two subjects, but the bursting of colour, reflections and life in their surroundings suggest its something important, something wonderful.
SONGAccidental Meetings | Chaos in the CBD
This jazzy house track feels very serendipitous to me. The slow build up of beats and the calming, repetitiveness of the bass feels like it’s written about something that’s just, suppose to happen, right? The title ‘Accidental Meetings’ and the lyrics about a mysterious ‘lady love’ that has left the singer all alone creates this lost narrative over a very safe, continuous and loyal sound. The whole concept of serendipity, in that it’s something we don’t go out looking for, but find, to our surprise, is the feeling I get when I listen to Chaos in the CBD. To me, this song (inspired by the words of Pagan Kennedy) cultivates the art of finding what we’re not seeking. There is a future, a knowing in the beats, a knowing of something that the lost voice doesn’t.
POETRYBygones | Marina Keegan
So if serendipity is the lucky discovery of something agreeable or valuable by accident, ‘zemblanity’ is a term coined in the 20th century to mean the opposite. A more, unpleasant accidental discovery. This poem is sad. It’s about life passing you by, so fleeting and scary. It’s about trying to please people, or be someone people expect you to be, when really you should be taking your life in your own hands.
“Do you wanna leave soon?
No, I want enough time to be in love
with everything.”
What is zemblanitous (definitely not a word) in this poem for me is the sadness, and the “cautionary tale” nature to it. Marina, young and promising, died in a car accident two days after her graduation at Yale. However, the discovery and coincidental nature of the poem is still of value. It’s a lesson in living your life for you, with the haunting last two stanzas saying it all:
“So I went to Yale.
So I got good grades.
So we beat on
birds flocking south until we
circle round and realize maybe,
maybe all that running wasn’t worth it.
Or the snow comes, and the sun rises, and the vacuum starts,
And I cry because everything is so beautiful and so short.”
Happy new year! I hope 2018 is filled with strange, quiet, beautiful moments that leave you thinking for at least a little while.
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