You can’t find serendipity unless you get lost

 

The cardinal navigational law of serendipity is this: You can only get to the magic kingdom by getting lost. You get there when you think you are going somewhere else and fall off the maps.

Take the case of Mark Twain's search for fortune in Brazil. He wasn't yet Mark Twain. He was young Sam Clemens from Missouri, eking out a living in a print shop in Iowa, drinking red whiskey and dreaming of greatness.

Up there in the guest house in Keokuk, Iowa, Sam Clemens read a book that described “a vegetable product with miraculous powers” that grew in Brazil. Sam was “fired with a longing” to go up the Amazon, secure a supply of this miracle plant – and make a fortune. He sailed to New Orleans on a riverboat whose pilot was the celebrated Horace Bixby.

When he got to New Orleans, Sam found that no ship in port was sailing for Brazil, and no one could tell him how to get there. So he changed his plans, sought out Bixby, and used his gift of the gab to persuade the old river man to take him on as an apprentice pilot, which was a pretty good meal ticket in those days.

Working on the Mississippi river, he got many of the ideas for the books that made him famous under the pen-name he now borrowed from the boatmen’s cry “Mark Twain”, meaning two fathoms, safe water.

The miracle plant Sam had set out to find was coca. Had he succeeded in his original plan, Keokuk, Iowa would have become the cocaine capital of America. Because Sam Clemens couldn’t find Brazil, he failed to become the first cocaine dealer in North American history and instead became Mark Twain.

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Mark Twain made a lifelong study and practice of navigating by coincidence. For more on this, read "Mark Twain's Rhyming Life" in The Secret History of Dreaming by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

 

A novelist finds his island by getting lost

In order to find what we are really seeking, we may first have to get lost. As I wrote in The Three “Only" Things, this is the cardinal navigational law of serendipity: You can only get to the magic kingdom by getting lost. You get there when you think you are going somewhere else and fall off the maps. Here’s a current literary example.

David Mitchell relates that around Christmas in 1994, in Nagasaki, he got off at a wrong tram stop and stumbled upon “a greenish moat and cluster of warehouses from an earlier century.” This was his first encounter with Dejima, a trading factory of the Dutch East India Company built on a man-made island in Nagasaki harbor. For two and a half centuries, when Japan was closed to the outside world, this was the sole point of contact between Japan and the west.

Twelve years and much research after alighting at the wrong tram stop, Mitchell published his extraordinary historical novel The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, in which most of the action unfolds on or near to Dejima at the end of the 18th century. The novel  richly deserves its tremendous critical and commercial success. Mitchell succeeds in transporting us into the mental and physical worlds of two very different peoples in a very different time. He is a master of what he amusingly calls “Bygonese”, conveying how people thought and talked in an earlier time in a way that never seems labored or antiquarian. 

Mitchell's vividly realized characters will linger in the reader's memory.Some of their statements stir and sear the soul, as when Orito, the selfless Japanese midwife, says near the end of the story:

When pain is vivid, when decisions are keen-edged, we believe that we are the surgeons. But time passes, and one sees the whole more clearly, and now I perceive us as surgical instruments used by the world.

Dejima, the invented island, is indelible among Mitchell's huge cast.  And the author found it by getting lost.

Illustration: Dutch plan of Dejima c1825

Many faces

London

One of my rules for navigating by synchronicity is that we may need to get lost in order to get found. This could be termed the Sindbad Principle. In his sixth voyage, Sindbad the sailor falls off the maps, gets shipwrecked, loses his crew, and is washed up half-drowned on an unknown shore that proves to be the magical kingdom of Serendib, from which we derive the word "serendipity". You can't get there by following a map or a plan.

I became a little lost in my longish walk to a recent workshop in Kensington (London) and this brought me to Thurloe Square, which I would otherwise have missed. In the square is an amazing sculpture showing what looks like a being with multiple faces. This seemed a perfect image for a central theme of the workshop: identifying and integrating multiple versions of the self.

I returned to the square in the rain, after lunch in the cafe at the Victoria & Albert museum across the street, to take a photograph. I then read the inscription that explained that the sculpure honors victims of Soviet terror killed after forced transfer to Soviet-occupied territories at the end of World War II. Synchronicity spoke again: at least 12 members of my workshop were from Eastern Europe, including three Lithuanians and two Russians.