It is a Sunday, I am listening to “The Best of Bread” because I suddenly remembered “Everything I own” from weekend afternoon’s long gone playing in my Sister’s bedroom across the hall. Janet was a big David Gates Fan-Girl. It was sentimental mush back then for the teenage Zepplin loving me, but now it is a random glimpse into the long ago’s of my memory. It is a moment to smile and remember being young and feckless. This set me to thinking about the randomness of life.
I’ve been thinking about randomness lately, how it quietly shapes our lives, especially the moments we treasure most. Like the day Val and I went for a drive, chasing the idea of a waterfall we had never seen but had been told “Was Lovely” and instead met an alpaca called Georgie. Not exactly a unicorn at the end of a double rainbow, perhaps, but magical in its own absurd, unexpected way.
It seems that life, or at least the bits we remember, is stitched together by randomness. Random acts of kindness. The weather deciding, on a whim, to throw a double rainbow over our wee house on a dreich day at Dolphin View Cottages Hillockhead. A stranger’s smile. A new path taken for no good reason except curiosity. As my Father would say “I wonder what’s down this wee road” when out for a drive, it normally ended with us stopped near a bridge and looking to see if there fish in the river that ran underneath it .. and then there was Georgie the alpaca standing calmly at the edge of the road as if he had been waiting for Val all morning.
We humans are pattern-seeking creatures. We spot faces in clouds, a Pooh Bear drifting next to what is undoubtedly Piglet. We call it coincidence, happenstance, kismet, luck. We accept these moments with a kind of quiet delight, but so often, we don’t seek them out. We plan, we schedule, we control, and in doing so, we sometimes close the door to the beautiful, ridiculous serendipity that makes life worth remembering.
Maybe the trick is to leave more room for randomness, to wander without a goal, to say yes more often, to follow the road that doesn’t make sense on SatNav. Because who knows? There might be a Georgie waiting there.