1. the faculty of making fortunate discoveries by accident
2. my new favorite word
I once had a significant other who attributed our meeting* to the benevolent hands of fate. He not only told this to me, but also to my grandparents, his mother, and several friends upon recounting the circumstances of our meeting. I occasionally get the urge to call him up to ask if he still believes our meeting was fate, or if he has downgraded it to something less mystical after two successive break-ups. The urge to raise my cynical eyebrows is just barely tempered by my desire to not be a complete bitch.
Actually, the circumstances of my current relationship would weave much better into the story of a meeting destined by fate. How many vegetarian-atheist-humanist-business-oriented-not-mushy-yet-still-affectionate-ambitious-but-not-entirely-serious people can there really be in central Ohio? We met! We’ve been dating for six months! The perfect story of two people destined to be together meeting and beginning a relationship! Sounds pretty, eh?
As you might have guessed, I don’t buy it. (Could you feel the eyebrows going up?) Let’s see... fate or a divine being (or whatever) is going to go to all that trouble to bring together two people who don’t believe in fate or a divine being (or whatever)... so they can further reinforce one another’s lack of belief? Really, this seems like a pretty lousy marketing strategy to me.
Fate is creepy, as far as I’m concerned. Some omnipotent power controlling my life? No thank you! I also cheerfully reject destiny, karma, divine will, and metaphysical predestination. This isn’t to say I believe I entirely control all aspects of my life. When things work out, as they often do, I certainly don’t think it’s because I orchestrated everything perfectly- I’ve had too many moments where everything has come crashing down despite my best intentions to believe this. However, I’ve found that a blend of human action, environmental factors, and random butterfly flapping (see below), can be used to explain whatever happens in my life. Fate, while it sounds prettier, just isn’t necessary.
The world can be entirely logical and yet still seem quite random. The chaos theory is a mathematical concept that explains how it is possible to get seemingly random results from normal equations. A multitude of small occurrences can significantly affect the outcome of seemingly unrelated events. The most commonly used example is of butterflies** flapping their wings causing hurricanes in other continents, but this is fairly misleading (it wasn’t JUST the butterflies) and somewhat misses the point (no, we shouldn’t exterminate butterflies to end hurricanes). The point is, in any one event, there are many difficult-to-sort factors affecting the outcome. So, while whatever nifty or awful event COULD theoretically be entirely explained by logical forces, it's quite likely we may not have the tools/time/energy to trace all of the many causes.*** This doesn’t make the event metaphysical; it just makes it complex.
The only remaining problem: I like pretty words. While I’ve crossed fate off my list, it would be lovely to have something more elegant than “chaos” in my repertoire. Enter serendipity, “the faculty of making fortunate discoveries by accident”. Serendipity gives me an artistic sounding yet non-metaphysical way of describing what others might call fate. I can pull serendipity out when others instead throw up their hands and call in fate or a divine being (or whatever) to explain their good fortune. In fact, identifying serendipitous events is a even a faculty, meaning each time I discover something new to be excited about, I can attribute it to skill– I do love having skills. The discovery of the word serendipity was serendipitous indeed.****
* On the Internet, no less. I think that there should be a rule specifically prohibiting the attribution of anything that happens online to fate. Computers are all 1s and 0s. Contrary to what some of my more computer-obsessed friends might believe, there is little room for the divine in 1s and 0s.
** ‘cause they’re pretty
*** I apologize to any scientists who feel that I have utterly bastardized the concept of chaos theory. This is certainly a possibility. If this IS the case, I’m still going to apply whatever theory I described to my argument. Should it not already exist, I officially name this new, exciting theory Aviaa’s Theory.
**** Meta-serendipity?
