SERENDIPITY: IS IT COINCIDENCE, SELF-MADE, OR DIVINE?

A central theme of SOUL AFFLICTED is the quest for this answer

This is part one of a two-part piece.

This picture quite seriously changed my life. And the life of the person who took it, too. The conversation between us as the camera clicked proved to be pure path-altering, career-shaping serendipity for us both.

It’s a concept that I’ve seen play out over and anew in my life and sometimes in the lives of others. The perfect opportunity or person finds you because you were at the right place and time. Coincidence? Fate? God’s Will? Serendipity? Or all the above?

In August 1988 I was 23 years old and a year into my first duty assignment in the U.S. Air Force. As the caption describes, I was a space systems computer operator—far less cool than it sounds—and I was lucky or good enough to win some accolades, like this weekly feature in one of our local military newspapers. But I didn’t enjoy the job and it wasn’t what I wanted when I enlisted a year earlier.

I’d wanted to be a journalist since high school, a syndicated columnist. When I partied my way out of journalism school at Northeastern University, I thought the Air Force’s public affairs career field would be my ticket, so in March 1987, I enlisted. The Air Force, however, didn’t see me as a journalist or public affairs specialist. They needed junior enlisted space systems computer operators more than they needed public affairs specialists, even one with a Boston Globe internship and several bylines in his hometown newspaper. That’s how I ended up loading computer tapes and why Staff Sergeant Susan Lawrie tried to make loading computer tapes look cool. It was the most active, visual thing I did on the job.

This was the first time I met Sergeant Lawrie. She didn’t select me for the newspaper accolade; someone in authority did. I had no idea. I found out when I was told someone from public affairs was coming to take my picture. She was the editor of the small military base’s twice-monthly newspaper, and she also covered our base for the Space Observer, the larger newspaper that served the Colorado Springs Air Force community out of nearby Peterson Air Force Base. She would be in and out of my life in 15 minutes.

Sergeant Lawrie was pleasantly casual and asked me standard questions for the photo caption. Where was I from? Why did I enlist? What did I enjoy about my job? I shared my journalism background and my hope to apply for her career field, public affairs, when I became eligible to “re-train” at three years of service, some 20 months away.

That changed everything.

Sergeant Lawrie had a problem. She wanted to leave the service for an opportunity in her coastal Carolina hometown, but she had more than two years left on her enlistment contract. The military doesn’t just let you quit for a better job, and public affairs was a very small career field back then—probably still is—with less than a thousand enlisted people across the Air Force. Assignments were carefully managed because every newly filled position also created an open position elsewhere. The Air Force was willing to let Susan leave the service early only if someone could fill her position at no cost to the Air Force. They were not going to disrupt assignment cycles, move personnel and perhaps entire families, and leave a public affairs office somewhere else short-staffed just to accommodate her personal desire. She had to find a qualified enlisted public affairs person who could step into her job without leaving another public affairs job empty and at no relocation or training cost to the Air Force. She needed someone who shouldn’t exist. Someone exactly like me.

I wasn’t eligible to even apply to retrain into public affairs until March 1990, nearly two years away. But calls were made, bureaucratic wheels were turned, and of course, paperwork flowed. It wasn’t easy. My squadron had to agree to give me up, and my immediate supervisor was opposed. I was, after all, an “employee of the quarter” type with an SCI security clearance. But our squadron commander, a lieutenant colonel, overruled him and on my three-year anniversary of service, the date that I became eligible to apply to retrain into the public affairs career field, I took Susan’s chair as editor of the base newspaper at Falcon Air Force Station. (It’s now called Schriever Space Force Base.) A few weeks later, she left the military and started a long career of civilian public service. We remain friends today, nearly 40 years later.

Serendipity indeed. Was it fate? Luck? God’s Plan?

Perhaps I created my own fate and this serendipitous moment for myself. One of my favorite quotes has long been, “Chance favors the prepared mind,” from Robert Goddard, considered the father of U.S. rocket science. In other words, serendipity is more likely to find you if you are pursuing a goal or dream. You are following a path of knowledge and experience to reach that goal or dream, and Goddard’s quote seems to imply that serendipity lies in wait along that path.

As I wrote above, I didn’t enjoy my Air Force job. In fact, I was quite dissatisfied with it, and with the service for their lack of foresight to put me in a job for which I was more qualified. If I didn’t get approved to retrain, I’d almost certainly leave the service when my enlistment was up. But I also knew that if I was serious about retraining into public affairs, then I had to not only show my technical ability, like news writing, but also that I was a “sharp troop” whose military record and demeanor would appeal to whoever would make such decisions. So I embraced every opportunity to stand out. My uniform was always flawless. I volunteered for tasks and duties that got me out of our secure computer operations center, so I could interact with people other than my two or three fellow shift-workers. When I was appointed safety monitor for my section, I made sure, even as a low-ranking airman, that our section safety records and training were the best-documented in the squadron. Those things were why I was named airman of the quarter, and the Space Observer’s Super Performer of the week. If I didn’t pursue that path, I don’t meet my friend Susan.

What about Susan? She didn’t create that serendipitous opportunity for herself. For far from the first time, she was asked, probably ordered, to shoot an airman’s photo. If she’d been unable to take the task, someone else would have, and we likely would have never met. But she did, and it changed the course of both of our lives. So, was she fated to meet the answer to her problem? Was she walking her own path to serendipity?

And how much does faith and a higher power play into this? If God is omnipotent and “has a plan” as many believers believe, then an atheist can do their part in God’s plan simply by living their lives, no religion or faith necessary. When Susan shot my picture in 1988, I was an ardent atheist. God or spirituality had no role in my choices. When I discovered Goddard’s quote a couple years later—I’d advanced to editor of a military magazine covering space operations—it was an affirmation that I had blazed my own path, I had generated my own lucky break.

Some years later, after I’d found faith in a higher power, I caught a quote from Ray Lewis, pro football hall of famer and a man known for both his work ethic and deep faith in God. I’m paraphrasing him, because I can’t find the original quote but he’s spoken of the idea many times. He said that we, as individuals, must prepare ourselves to receive God’s blessings—through moral character, hard work and pursuit of our goals—so that when those blessings come, we are ready to receive them. If we are not prepared, the blessing will pass us by and we may never notice.

Apply this concept to serendipity. Are they not the same? Luck is an unexpected boon or opportunity, a chance meeting that changes your path. For the spiritual or religious, a blessing is the same thing, and an affirmation of faith. Whichever you believe, such things can happen to you through pure coincidence or luck. But such coincidence is more likely to happen if you’re actively pursuing a goal, because you are putting yourself in position to meet serendipity or luck or blessings related to that goal simply through the act of pursuing it.

How deep does this rabbit hole go? I explore that hole in my novel Soul Afflicted. I’ll dig deeper into it in part two of this piece.