The Three "Only" Things: Tapping the Power of Dreams, Coincidence, and Imagination (17 page)

Did I buy the farm? You bet.

Since then, I track the movements of red-tailed hawks whenever they appear in a landscape. If the hawk is flying my way, or hunting successfully, I know I am on the right track.

Every Moment Is a Learning Opportunity

When we understand that the world is a book of symbols, we may come to grasp that every moment is a learning opportunity, in absolutely any situation.

While I was exploring this theme, a book came tumbling out of a teetering pile — one of many — in my house. I picked it up, alert to a possible intervention by the Library Angel, and found it was a “mirror for princes,” a book of guidance that a medieval philosopher-prince on the border of Persia composed for his son.

I found amazing insights here, including a thought that speaks directly to our theme of seizing every opportunity to read the symbols of the world. Kai Ka'us advised his son: “Do not appoint any particular time for learning; whatever the time or the circumstances, not a moment should be allowed to lapse without your learning something.”

6. EVERY SETBACK OFFERS AN OPPORTUNITY

The genesis of the wildly successful ABC television series
Desperate Housewives
is a marvelous example of how when we find one door blocked, another may be ready to open. Scriptwriter Marc Cherry was out of work, at his mother's place watching a TV news report on Andrea Yates, the young mother convicted of drowning her children in a bathtub. He turned to his mother, horrified, and asked, “Can you imagine being so desperate you would do that to your children?” His mother removed the cigarette from her mouth and said, “I've been there.” Cherry had his title, before he had written a word of the script.

He developed a script and gave it to his agent. She showed it to several networks, and they all turned it down. Then his agent was charged with embezzling from her clients, including Cherry. He found a new agent, who saw his project as “a soap opera with dark comedy potential,” and it sold it right away.

Getting to Know the Gatekeeper

If we can manage not to spend too much time feeling sorry for ourselves, or raging over what has gone wrong, we have a chance of finding opportunity in almost any setback. Of course this can be hard to grasp when we have lost something very dear to us, or are staring bankruptcy in the face, or are suffering a terrible illness.

In the darkest moments of my life, I sometimes try on one or both of these statements:
What does not kill me makes me stronger
and
The fire that melts the butter tempers the steel
.

Both phrases are from Nietzsche. When I can say one or both of those lines without rebelling or recoiling inside my body, I know I'm ready to go looking for the opportunity that is waiting for me — ready to turn my attention from any past history of failure and disappointment toward a new horizon.

When I do that, I sometimes notice that what has been blocking me or pushing me back feels like a personal force — and is personal in a sense that goes beyond any other personalities involved in the situation.

I think of this force as the Gatekeeper. He (he is male for me; maybe female for you) is actively engaged in opening and closing doors and roads in life. He is honored by various names in various cultures, but we don't need those names here.

All we need to appreciate is that by entering into a conscious connection with our personal Gatekeeper, we might find it easier to find the right openings, especially when the road has seemed to be closed.

At a certain passage in my life, I was exhausting myself trying to push through a certain project that seemed to be terminally blocked. I felt I was beating on a solid door that simply would not open.

Flopped down in an easy chair, trying for a short nap, I suddenly saw my situation with dreamlike objectivity. There I was, trying to beat down that door. The door was studded with metal, and my knuckles were turning bloody as I kept on trying to break it down.

Then I felt a shiver — truth comes with goosebumps — and looked in a different direction. I saw that there was an open archway quite near to me. Beyond it were beautiful gardens and (it seemed to me) all manner of earthly delights. Standing in the archway was an elegant but tricksterish figure who seemed familiar, beckoning to me. I moved toward his crooked finger and through the archway into the garden of delights. I had lost my witness perspective, ready to enjoy myself.

Yet I needed to see the larger picture. I looked back, trying to understand what was going on here, and I noticed two things. While the Gatekeeper in my fantasy had been beckoning me with one hand, he had been using the other to hold that studded door closed against me. And what was behind that door I had thought it so important to go through was a space like a jail cell, a place of confinement.

As a result of this vision, I abandoned a commercial project I had been trying to develop and decided to give my full energies to riskier creative work that did not offer an obvious way to pay the bills — but it eventually did that, and far more.

I've come to believe that some of the blocks and setbacks we encounter in life are placed on our paths by our Gatekeeper to save us from compounding mistakes, to make us take a longer view of our issues — and encourage us to shift direction and notice better options.

7. TO FIND OUR WAY,
WE MAY NEED TO GET LOST

Appian of Alexandria was a famous historian in the heyday of the Roman Empire. He wrote in Greek, but was a Roman citizen and very definitely one of the ruling caste.

So when a violent rebellion broke out in Roman-ruled Egypt in the time of Trajan, Appian was one of those targeted by the rebels — Jews who believed that a new messiah had come. He fled across the marshes of the Nile Delta, with an Arab guide, heading for a ship that was waiting for him on one of the branches of the river. He had arranged for the ship to take him to safety in the port of Pelusium.

Appian and his guide traveled all night through the marshes. At dawn, a crow shrieked and the guide said, “We are lost.”

The crow squalled again, and the Arab said grimly, “We are utterly and completely lost.”

Appian, believing his life was at risk and that his pursuers were close behind, fell into despair.

The crow shrieked for a third time. The Arab's expression turned to complete joy. “Ah, but it is such good luck that we became lost. There is a shortcut just ahead.”

Though Appian may not have understood this, he was fortunate to have a guide who knew the language of crows. In many traditions, crows are messengers, and close attention is paid to their actions.

The Arab led the way decisively, and very soon they came to a branch of the Nile and saw a galley in full sail. However, this was not the expected meeting place nor the same ship on which Appian had arranged passage.

“Where are you going?” Appian called to the captain.

“Pelusium!” the captain called back.

Of course, Appian boarded the galley, which carried him to Pelusium safely. By his own account, his life was saved because he got lost and took the “wrong” boat. The ship that had been engaged to take him to Pelusium was captured by the rebels, and its passengers and crew were held as prisoners or killed.

Sometimes we must get lost in order to find the right way.

The Navigational Law of Serendipity

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.

The eighteenth-century writer Horace Walpole imported the word
serendipity
into the English language after reading a Persian story in which traveling princes were “always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of.” In Walpole's lexicon, serendipity is thus the effect of “accidental sagacity.”

In the story of his sixth voyage, Sindbad the Sailor gets hopelessly lost, is overwhelmed by a terrible storm, and is shipwrecked on an alien shore — to discover that he has been washed up on the wonderful island of Serendib, a place of incredible beauty and riches. Our word
serendipity
is derived from the name of that magical island. As in the story, we find this land only by getting lost.

Such episodes abound in the literal history of world exploration. Leif Eriksson, who may have been the first European to set foot in North America, got there while trying to outrun a storm. Christopher Columbus famously discovered a new continent while looking for a new way to somewhere else — India.

“Accidental Sagacity” in Science and Invention

Serendipity is a major factor in scientific discovery and invention, as in exploration, successful military command, and entrepreneurship. Alfred Nobel produced gelignite — a more stable explosive than dynamite, which he also invented — when he accidentally mixed collodium (gun cotton) with nitroglycerin. Swiss chemist Albert Hoffmann discovered the properties of LSD by accidentally ingesting it at his lab.

Here is a quick inventory of some other important or wellknown inventions and products that were the gift of “accidental sagacity”:

Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin because he neglected to isolate bacterial cultures from stray spores blowing around in his hospital building — notably from a mycologist's lab on the floor below. Fleming went away on vacation. When he returned, he found that penicillin mold had killed his bacteria — and saw with his trained eye an extraordinary cure.

Rayon was discovered by the French chemist Hilaire de Chardonnet, an assistant to Louis Pasteur, when he spilled a bottle of collodion and later noticed that as the liquid evaporated, it changed into a viscous substance from which thin fibers could be drawn.

Charles Goodyear learned how to vulcanize rubber — producing the automobile tire and spawning the automotive revolution in transportation — after he accidentally left a mixture on a hot plate that turned into hard rubber.

The secret of America's favorite breakfast cereal was discovered when the Kellogg brothers left cooked wheat untended for a day, and then found that when they tried to roll the mass, they got flakes instead of a sheet.

The glue that makes Post-it notes possible was accidentally discovered by a scientist who was trying to produce a strong adhesive, but developed a very weak one instead.

The secret of ink-jet printers was discovered by a Canon engineer when he accidentally placed a hot soldering iron on his pen — and then saw ink jetting fromthe pen's tip a few moments later.

Finally, Viagra was originally tested as a drug to help with hypertension and angina. Clinical trials revealed that it did not do much for angina, but it had a marked effect on another physical condition in males.

Notice that more than “dumb luck” was involved in these inventions and discoveries. The people responsible for them were able to add “sagacity” — skill, experience, and practical imagination — to “accidents,” thus becoming true exemplars of what Walpole called “accidental sagacity.” To put it another way, they were prepared to get lucky. As Louis Pasteur remarked, “Chance favors the prepared mind.”

The accidents and missteps that provided the vital clues would have been ignored — except as triggers for curses and complaints — by anyone except the prepared, creative, questing minds that saw the magic in apparent mistakes.

It may be that inventors and creators
attract
the right kind of accidents. In
Fire in the Crucible
, his study of creative genius, John Briggs rightly observed that “Creators actively court chance. They're always ready to notice and amplify with insight some accident of their environment virtually everybody else thinks is trivial or fails to notice. This capacity is, in a deep sense, what makes creators creative.”

8. LOOK FOR THE HIDDEN HAND

I was walking with a friend in the New Forest in Hampshire. We were both undergoing major life changes, which is not always smooth sailing. We had had a major row the night before, drinking too much and bumping up against darker sides of each other's personalities. Now we were walking, detoxifying, working it through. We walked all day, traveling fifteen or twenty miles on those forest trails, losing track of distance and — we finally noticed — direction. England may be a rather small country, but the New Forest is not a small wood. We looked at each other and laughed, realizing that in our effort to find ourselves, we had become utterly lost.

I said out loud, “I wish a guide would just appear out of nowhere and show us the way. Wouldn't that be fabulous?”

My friend laughed like a crow. We had seen no one in the forest that day.

But within aminute or two, a runner appeared on our trail. He waved to us cheerily. “You two look lost. Need some help?”

“Yes, please.”

“Mustn't break my stride. I'll leave you markers.”

A minute later, he had vanished in the dappled wood. We followed his lead. At the next fork in the trail, we found he had indeed left a marker — an arrow formed with three sticks — showing us the right way to go. We found a succession of these arrows at every crossing or forking of the trail, along the whole two-mile distance back to the main road.

The Gods Love to Travel in Disguise

The Greeks say the gods love to travel in disguise. In Greek folk tradition, it's good policy to be nice to strangers, and to pay attention to what they say, because you never know who is traveling behind their masks.

On another visit to England, I landed at Heathrow on a redeye flight, exhausted and burdened with financial worries. I was carrying too much baggage and had to wrestle an oversize suitcase down the steps to the Underground.

As I collapsed onto a seat on the train, a roly-poly man, bearded like Santa Claus,
winked
atme fromthe seat opposite. He said with a broad grin, “The Buddha says — walk on the bridge, don't build on it.”