It's the Old Serendipity Trick Again!

Yesterday I posted a photograph and an old poem of mine on this blog. Nothing unusual there you might say, but quite the contrary my dear friends. You see, that post was meant for my other blog, which some of you may have been introduced to. No? Well it’s great. I mean the pictures on there are absolutely fantastic. You just have to see it for yourself. So, here’s the link.

Anyway, not wanting to stray too far from my train of thought I shall return to yesterday’s post and it’s ‘misplacement’ here. The inverted commas, quotation marks, or whatever the grammatically correct call them these days, suggest or should suggest that there was no misplacement. This despite my intention of posting the photo and the poem on my photo blog (called ‘Instants out of Time’ by the way). Let’s not call it misplacement; let’s call it serendipity.

Good word that. Serendipity. It suggests that there are no mistakes or accidents, that things happen as they are meant to, that the cards fall where they will. Well you get the picture eh? You see, last night I must have been a whole lot tireder than I thought I was. I went merrily about the task of posting that picture and poem to the other blog, not realising for who knows what reason that I was positing it here instead.

Indeed: who knows for what reason anything happens? As it turns out, a dear friend saw that post on this blog, and he is not yet following me on the other blog (some friends can be a bit slow with such things) and would therefore have missed the post. It had an impact for him you see. He read it, looked at the image and we’ve had a good discussion about it during which I have learned more about him, him about me, and me about me. Maybe him about him too. Who knows?

Yes, serendipity. The word itself is apparently very hard to translate into languages other than English. I can see why. Early definitions focus on it meaning finding something you didn’t expect to find, while more modern definitions talk about ‘accident’ and ‘chance’ and ‘fortunate’. I dig the old one better don’t you? I mean I didn’t expect to post on the ‘wrong’ blog, and my friend didn’t ‘expect’ such a post on this blog. All round a happy accident I think. (note: there are no such things as accidents!)