On serendipity

 

On January 28, 1754, English writer Horace Walpole, in a letter to his friend Horace Mann, coined a word he found “very expressive.”

 

He believed its meaning was better understood through its derivation, so he recounted a “silly fairy tale” he had read, The Three Princes of Serendip.

 

The tale follows three sons of King Giaffer who, having received the best education their kingdom could offer, were sent abroad by their father to learn the ways of the world.

 

During their travels, the princes encountered a merchant searching for a missing camel. Though they had never seen the animal, they described it with remarkable accuracy, drawing conclusions from clues that others might have overlooked.

 

It was through “accidents and sagacity,” Walpole wrote, that the princes discovered clues they had not set out to find.

 

“Now do you understand Serendipity?” he asked Mann.

 

Jacaranda has, as those dear to me might know, been the most meaningful experience in my twenty-four years of life.

 

Nearly a decade has passed since I first visited Malawi. I've spent much of that time trying to understand why nothing I experienced or achieved thereafter has quite come close.

 

Perhaps it was the realization, at fifteen, of how little I knew about the world beyond my own, or the awe that came with discovering just how much there was to know. But it is getting to know John Samson that I remember.

 

Creating a music video with John took me across Blantyre, through local markets and onto minibuses, to the neighborhood where he lived and the cemetery where his mother was buried.

 

I still think about the day John entrusted me with his USB drive and the lyrics he had translated by hand from Chichewa into English. I was to take them home and complete what I now consider our magnum opus.

 

I have been chasing after that feeling ever since.

 

Glimpses of it found me twice after Jacaranda: the first in January 2022, with Pat, a Banana Republic sales associate, and the second just last month, with a sixty-two-year-old London black cab driver.

 

Although I had never known Pat before she took me along the bustling streets of midtown Manhattan to search for a blazer, or the driver before he told me about his three-year service in the Royal Green Jackets near the end of the Cold War, somewhere between her recollections of moving from Singapore to New York in the nineties and his candor about mortality as he grappled with his prostate cancer diagnosis, I stumbled upon new ways of looking at life.

 

There is luck involved in an unexpected encounter. But there is also the perceptiveness to recognize something worth pursuing, a capacity I believe begins with a willingness to listen, ask questions and be challenged by unfamiliar perspectives.

 

I thought about the friends I reconnected with in Taiwan, San Francisco and London during my solo trip in October, and those I got to know over the past two and a half years in New York.

 

We've all changed. Our ambitions, interests and convictions evolved. Some are charting the frontiers of AI and scientific innovation, while others found themselves on paths they never imagined taking.

 

We've also made important decisions about our future, families and relationships.

 

Each of us, I suspect, has encountered moments of serendipity.

 

And perhaps it's these unlikely encounters, and what we make of them, that make life ever so fulfilling.

 

I wonder what I might discover in hearing your stories, and what you might discover in telling them. There could be something serendipitous in the conversations we share: a fresh perspective, an old belief reconsidered, or a newfound curiosity that leads us somewhere new.

 

So having recounted my own “silly fairy tale” in this rather lengthy letter, I invite you to tune in to my podcast series, XXX.