Whatever you value most in your life can always be traced back to some jumble of chance occurrences you couldn’t possibly have planned for, and that you certainly can’t alter retrospectively now.*
Oliver Burkeman

There’s always something just beneath the surface, the element that most people simply don’t notice. But we can if we choose.**
Seth Godin

Someone happened to loan me this book,
I bumped into and had a conversation with this person,
It turned out that someone saw my blog and passed it to a friend …
Again and again, happenstance has shaped my life in
larger and smaller ways –
At no point did I sit down and map all of this out,
But one thing I did determine to do,
As often as I was aware of what was happening, was to
look beneath the surface, to go
deeper, to open and explore the
randomness, towards making something from it,
Which will hopefully lead me into more happenstance.

(I begin my day journalling, for which one of my sources is
last year’s journal entry, and
it just so happened that I read tomorrow’s entry
rather than today’s by mistake – happenstance in action –
So perhaps these thoughts might help you in
some random way today.)

*Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks;
**Seth Godin’s blog: The things you can’t see.