Serendipity

From the last blog, “Willing to Be Pleased,” we find that a willingness to be pleased leads to a willingness to change; meaning, a willingness to change course, attitude, perspective, outcome, expectations, etc.Notice that the word “willing: means to will it.*[1]Will is the mental faculty by which one deliberately chooses or decides upon a course of action.What has been amazing to me is that the more I engage with the willingness to change, the more serendipity shows up in my life.From Wikipedia:Serendipity means a "happy accident" or "pleasant surprise"; a fortunate mistake. Specifically, the accident of finding something good or useful while not specifically searching for it.We can amplify serendipity by looking for it.  When something does not “go our way,” we can simply look for why it is going our way.Last weekend I went kayaking and the trip was not working out to go to the place I like to go.  With a willingness to be pleased and a willingness to change, I started looking for why it was important not to go there, and I found a whole new set of places to go kayaking that will open up many future kayaking trips.We do make up our reality, and it is changeable in many ways.  I hope you are pleased by this blog.  You may also want to try all sorts of flavors of willingness:  A willingness to find beauty, a willingness to find meaning, a willingness to laugh, a willingness to engage, a willingness to listen, a willingness to share….What do you want to cultivate? 

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[1] From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: Will, in philosophy, refers to a property of the mind, and an attribute of acts intentionally committed. Actions made according to a person's will are called “willing” or “voluntary” and sometimes pejoratively “willful” or “at will”. In general, "will" does not refer to one particular or most preferred desire but rather to the general capacity to have such desires and act decisively based on them, according to whatever criteria the willing agent applies. The will is in turn important within philosophy because a person's will is one of the most distinct parts of their mind, along with reason and understanding. It is one of the things that makes a person who they are, and it is especially important in ethics, because it is the part which determines whether people act, at least when they act deliberately.