On Serendipity
This weekend, on my morning run, I saw someone riding a bike with a cat on their shoulder.
When I was thinking about moving out of Madison, I knew I wanted a bigger city, but I wasn’t sure exactly why.
My best guess had to do with better restaurants and public transit.
When I doubted myself, I thought I just like college and was trying to recreate that environment in vain.
Once on a visit to Milwaukee, I even considered that perhaps I just found it more comforting to be surrounded by tall buildings.
Even now, having moved, I usually stutter out a few sentences about how there’s lots of stuff to do, and how everything is so green, and how I don’t mind the rain (so far).
But one feature I didn’t anticipate and struggle to articulate is that Seattle is ripe for serendipity.
I learned about serendipity from the dictionary.
When you look up a word in a physical dictionary, following guide words, flipping back and forth, scanning pages, you’re likely to find other interesting new words on the way to the one you originally wanted.
This is a much different experience from searching online where you only learn the definition you meant to.
But it’s also different from reading the dictionary cover to cover or specifically looking for unusual words.
When you’re looking for a specific word, any goods ones that you come across on the way are a bonus.
When you’re looking for the most interesting word you can find, your success is capped by the best one you happen to find.
The conventional wisdom is that happiness is reality minus expectations.
The exact same party might be a pleasant surprise or a bust solely because you were dreading it or excited.
A serendipitous encounter is great because not only did reality exceed your nonexistent expectations, but also you feel lucky for walking into that particular gin joint.
But all dictionaries are not created equal.
A pocket dictionary has fewer and more common words than one of those behemoths in the library with its own table and tiny font.
We might say that the latter is riper for serendipity.
Not only does it contain more words, it harder to find the one you’re looking for; it takes more scanning and page-turns.
The fact that dictionaries are alphabetized means that words are roughly randomly distributed with respect to meaning and obscurity.
You can find words that are very far from your intended search.
That is in contrast to a system like Dewey Decimal.
If you’re looking for watercolor, an interesting photography book might catch your eye, but you’ll never see that book on folklore in the 300s.
Like dictionaries, some cities can be riper than others.
It seems roughly correlated to size, but it’s also related to density and diversity and the way you navigate the city.
The more sprawling and homogenous, and the more you can take your car directly between points you know you want to be at, the less likely you are to ever see anything you didn’t mean to.
New York is supersaturated in that it would be surprising to go out in the city and not see anything surprising.
Like happiness, serendipity is slippery.
It’s not just hard to catch it, it’s sort of nonsensical to go out looking for it.
But you can approach it side-on by putting yourself in ripe environments.