What surfing says about the importance of serendipity in life
Surfing, a dance with the unpredictable waves, mirrors life's serendipitous nature. It's a testament to the beauty of chance encounters and unexpected turns. Let's delve into the profound lessons surfing offers about the significance of serendipity in our lives.
Surfing is the opposite of existential bummedness
It’s a sublimely beautiful, profoundly meaningful, indeed totally awesome thing to do with one’s limited time in life, just for its own sake. It is, by itself, reason enough to be alive rather than not.
- There are ways to cope with the seeming meaningless of existence
- Eating a cheeseburger
- Taking a stroll outside with a friend or the dog. Spending time with kids
Serendipity is not sheer luck, but luck of a special sort
It’s also the sort of concept we use in finding a meaningful story in real events
- Random sequences of events present interesting, even predictable patterns by nothing more than chance
- Coincidences happen all the time in life and history, more than we like to believe
- What’s especially interesting to us is not tales of sheer coincidence but ways in which circumstances somehow worked out or coalesced with our active plans
What does it mean for there to be’meaning’ in life, or for life itself to have’meaning’?
Being open to serendipity, watching for it, celebrating it, and even bringing it about is a meaningful way of moving through the world and finding more meaning in life.
- The act of riding a wave, a fortunate coalescence between skill and circumstance, is a sort of sesentipity. The stories surfers constantly tell – about how the swell, wind, and tide came together just so, or about how they barely exited from an impossible tube ride – are stories of the serendiptitous.
Luck can be seen as a narrative concept – the sort that saliently leaves out causes.
Telling the story of a lottery win, one might say: ‘My wife bought me a lottery ticket and, wouldn’t you know it, it won.’ This simple story represents two events – the ticket purchase and the ticket draw for the win – and relates them as the surprising intersection of separate chains of causation, with no interesting common cause between them.