Serendipity
"Serendipity" is just a lovely word, in sound and meaning.

It sounds almost made-up, like something a child would name their imaginary friend. Whenever I use it while speaking, I get this tiny thrill... as if I'm pulling something over on my listeners by using such a delightful, joyful word while pretending to be an adult.

As for the meaning, I love that it conjures both random coincidence and destiny (or fate). The whole idea of serendipity reminds me to keep my eyes (and heart) open, as a moment is only serendipitous if you recognize it as such.

Other serendipitous thoughts:
- It's a soft yellow word to me
- It's great fun to write, and (for some reason) one of the few words in which I use a cursive 'r'
- The movie is one of my favorites, too! /grin

When I was 4 or 5 years old, I embarked on a very short-lived (and inadvertent) life of crime.

I used a tiny little manual wheelchair back then. When I'd go shopping with my mom, if there was some little treat I wanted, she'd let me carry it around the store and give it to the cashier myself. The problem, of course, is that when you're pushing yourself around in a wheelchair, you don't have any free hands, so the only place to put something is in your lap. And it can be easy to forget that you have something in your lap, particularly if you're always carrying around one thing or another and your legs are used to the sensation. You can see where this is going, can't you?

One day I went grocery shopping with my mom, and she let me pick out a pack of stickers to buy (Muppet Babies, of course). When we got to the checkout lane, though, it was quite chaotic, and I completely forgot to put the stickers on the counter. When we got outside and my mom saw that the stickers were still on my lap, she was mortified (and let me know that I should be mortified, too). She told me that she was taking the stickers back into the store and that I'd have to wait until the following week to buy them, both as punishment and because she didn't have any cash and wasn't going to write another check for $.49. That's when I really got upset, because I loved those stickers, darn it!

As it turned out, when my mom went back into the store to explain that I'd mistakenly shoplifted, the cashier and bag boy pooled their pocket change to buy the ill-gotten goods for me, and if I recall correctly, they even pitched in a sugar cookie from the bakery. So my run as a master criminal didn't turn out to be so bad, after all.

And man, were those stickers cool!

My second year of college I was selected as a Ford Apprentice Scholar through a Ford Foundation grant that allows select institutions to pluck young minds out of the undergraduate morass and start molding them for academia. We were each sponsored by a professor in our field, and for two years our cohort met for three hours once a week in the President's conference room to discuss the life of the mind. At 19, of course, I had very little awareness of the world beyond Pinellas County, Florida, and neither did most of my cohort. So during the first year of the program, we read a book a week, starting with Boethius and going all the way through Hawking. We studied rhetoric and philosophy and many histories.

The book that had the greatest impact on me that year - indeed, the book that set me on my current path - was Daniel Quinn's Ishmael. It's difficult to give a synopsis of the book's "plot" without sounding silly, as it's really allegory. This book was the first crack in the positivist mold by mind had been formed (followed, later, by The Chalice and the Blade and other foundational texts in the canon of this new world we are creating).

I've read Ishmael a number of times in the decade since I first encountered it. It's not a perfect book, either in conception or execution. But I continue to give a copy to every person I know who is trying to break out of the cocoon of modernity. It is accessible at a level more scholarly works are not; it is engaging; and it invites the reader to see the world through a new lens, and then go out and do something about what they see.