A couple of days back I saw the movie Serendipity starring John Cusack and Kate Beckinsale. The word ‘serendipity’ was coined by Horace Walpole in the 18th century, from the Persian fairy tale The Three Princes of Serendip (Serendip is an old name for the island now known as Sri Lanka). It means finding something unexpected and useful while searching for something else entirely. The central idea of the movie was that for a few moments the whole universe could just exist to bring two people together. This thought appealed to me. I consider myself a romantic to a certain degree. I do like watching the occasional ‘mushy’ movie. But they make very few good romantic movies these days: movies that have a certain element of fairytale-like magic and yet are realistic and believable. However I believe that unexpected things do happen in our lives. Things that we simply reject as coincidences are often slight hints and indications from the universe that it still remembers us and cares for us.
The late Douglas Adams in his Dirk Gently and Hitchhiker's series stressed on the interconnectedness of everything in this universe. This basic principle leads to some very interesting discoveries. The method of Zen Navigation, which is described in Dirk Gently series, can make for an amazing pass time. All you need is a car and a free afternoon. Just go out on the main road and follow any person who you feel knows where s/he is going. You could end up visiting some very interesting places.
Life does present us with a lot of opportunities but it is up to us to identify these signs and make the best of the situation. From my own personal experience and from the experience of some of my friends I have come up with a theory about the Circle of Life:
Let us consider ourselves the center of a circle and all the people we know (family, friends, girl-friend/s, etc.) to be arcs of different lengths on the circumference. The lengths of these arcs are directly proportional to our love for these people and their size can decrease or increase over time. The radius of this circle is a measure of our age and reaches a constant value around the time we are thirty. The area subtended by an arc at the center is a measure of the hard work and love that has gone into the relationship. Anyone who was ever a part of our life would always be a part of this circle no matter what.
When a child is born its radius is small and its parents take up the entire circumference. As one grows older, friends come into the picture and take their place on the bigger circle. The length of the parents arc is however still of the same length. By the time one reaches the age of 20, family and friends constitute nearly three-quarters of our circle. But a quarter of our circle is still unoccupied. This is a cause of a lot of unhappiness and unrest in our life. We are constantly looking for the person who will come into our lives and fill up this gap. In the case of men we are looking for the right women with whom we can spend the rest of our lives (yeah some men could be looking for other men but that doesn’t really matter). This state of unrest leads to many conquests and journeys. Girl friends come and go. But the gap cannot be filled as long as one-quarter area worth of hard work and love hasn’t gone into the relationship.
Some people are lucky and fall in love with each other instantly (remember it can be love only if both the people involved feel the same way about each other). Others have to work very hard to get the other person to fall in love with them. This process can go on for a long time and passes through various stages. It can be very tough and emotionally draining at times. One has to put his heart and soul into the whole thing and forget everything else. Many poets and writers have achieved greatness because of the work they produced during this period. But all our attempts can fail some times. That however should not stop us from following this path. Perseverance is the only way to survive in the game of love.
The other group of lucky bastards who had it easy in the beginning also have to work very hard in the later stages. Since they by-passed the stages of friendship, trust and commitment, they have to make up for it later. The relationship cannot survive as long as the quota of hardships and heartache is not full. The group, which was lucky initially, is the one that fails more often than the other group.
Some of us try to fill this gap in our life by making more friends and just hanging around with the old ones. This can never complete the circle of our life. I suppose finding the missing arc is the main aim of our life. And once we find that special someone it is up to us to do everything we can possibly do to make the relationship survive. This ordeal could go on for the rest of our life. We have to learn to start enjoying the journey as much as the goal. We have to create an Odyssey of our own.
People come and go. But they always remain a part of our lives. Sometimes we have to say goodbye to our rose as the little prince did in Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s classic book of the same name. The author of this book, which changed my life for the better, happens to share my birth date. Here is an excerpt from the book:
The little prince went away to look again at the roses. 'You are not at all like my rose', he said. 'As yet you are nothing. No one has tamed you, and you have tamed no one. You are like my fox when I first knew him. He was only a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But I have made him my friend, and now he is unique in all the world.' And the roses were very much embarrassed. 'You are beautiful, but you are empty', he went on. 'One could not die for you. To be sure, an ordinary passerby would think that my rose looked just like you - the rose that belongs to me. But in herself alone she is more important than all the hundred of you other roses: because it is she that I have watered; because it is she that I put under the glass globe; because it is she that I have sheltered behind the screen; because it is for her that I have killed the caterpillars (except the two or three that we saved to become butterflies); because it is she that I have listened to, when she grumbled, or boasted, or even sometimes when she said nothing. Because she is my rose.'
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