TL;DR
The author reflects on a week filled with unexpected events, starting with a finger injury during a football game. Initially disappointed by the disruption of his plans, he later embraces the unexpected break, finding happiness in slowing down, connecting with loved ones, and savoring the simple joys of life. The article encourages readers to balance planning with going with the flow, as serendipitous moments can lead to beautiful experiences and personal growth.
In 1927, Niels Bohr formulated his theory of complementarity, a momentous addition to a golden era of Quantum Physics research. Very well, before you stop reading what I hope will be a beautiful article, I want to reassure you that this article will be about the beauty of serendipity and not Quantum Physics.
Why talk about complementarity?
For quite some time now, I have thought and argued that the apex of wisdom is the realisation that in matters of judgement (on routes of action and not ethical questions), there are no rights or wrongs, only circumstances; to be wise is to master the circumstance. That said, it is as wise to stick to a fixed plan as it is wise to go with the flow, and as the devil is in the details, the wisdom is in the circumstance. When this thought came to me, I thought for a moment that I had formulated my own category until I realised Bohr had said the same thing differently; he called it complementarity.
A quick internet search will define complementarity as “a relationship or situation in which two or more different things improve or emphasise each other’s qualities.” I do not particularly like this version. I prefer a more yin-yang-like definition, “a relationship or situation in which two apparently opposite things improve or emphasise each other’s qualities.
Complementarity can provide a balanced and realistic answer when considering whether to always plan to the last detail or to go with the flow. From the complementarity viewpoint, planning and going with the flow are fantastic approaches. If correctly managed, pursuing either should strengthen our ability to pursue the other.
While planning to the last detail can often give us more confidence in difficult situations, going with the flow opens room for serendipity - the occurrence and development of events by chance in a happy or beneficial way. The question is if one should plan meticulously to guarantee an outcome or rely on chance to do the same. Complementarity says neither is superior, and learning to do both effectively is better. If you have any doubts about the merits of the previous assertion, remember that while Napoleon’s planning made him an excellent general, Prince Mikhail Illarionovich Golenishchev-Kutuzov Smolensk, known better to history as General Kutuzov, beat him by getting enough sleep and going with the flow. General Kutozov was an excellent general in his station, and for the most part, his approach was diametrically opposite to Napoleon’s planning to the death.
If you look keenly around you, you will find that for every Napoleon whose success is popularly explained by their meticulous planning, there is a Kutuzov doing just as well; neither approach is superior; there are only circumstances.
Now, let me tell you something I did not plan for; I typed this article predominantly with my right hand. Even though this was not the plan, is that a problem? Perhaps not.
A few weeks ago, I was anxiously awaiting the mid-semester break. I will be honest: this has been a crazy semester, and the prospect of having one week to sleep is the only motivation that saw me through my mid-terms. Given this, you might think I planned to rest. I am sorry to disappoint you; I had a three-day conference, work, and other personal projects to work on. I fooled myself into thinking that I wanted to rest. What I wanted was the autonomy to create the situations that keep me just as busy as opposed to having school do the same.
My mid-semester break started on Saturday with a student-organised sports festival. I planned to compete in sprinting and a 5-kilometre marathon. A football game was happening, and my school team needed a goalkeeper. Being a former goalkeeper, a friend tried hard to convince me to take the role. I insisted that without professional gloves to protect my fingers from situations that I had known too well in the past, I wasn’t going to play. And then the convincing got so good that I found myself on the field to shouts of “Onana” in a nod to my high-line style of play from the back and our shared nationality as Cameroonians.
It took only 15 minutes for serendipity and not planning to take the wheel, and in hindsight, it was beautiful.
In 15 minutes, I dived low to block a through pass and clashed with a talented striker whose sight on goal could be grounds for forgiving the force with which he kicked my hand and instantly dislocated my fourth finger. I got the better of the clash, and it was only minutes after taking the goal kick that I realised, as I said at the time, that I couldn’t feel my fingers.
My closest teammate, Bernard, quickly recommended that the first thing to do was to remove the not-professional gloves I was wearing over my hand. I did just that, and the immediate sight of my finger, the v-shaped thing I saw in place of what should have been straight-looking, quadrupled my pain. When I asked Bernard days later why he suggested taking off the glove instead of assuming it was a sprain and just pulling my finger like we often do, he told me that he had seen such situations often enough to know it was more complicated than just a sprain. With his experience and ability to make the right call in that situation, Bernard being the first to react to my distress call is down to serendipity, and that was only the beginning.
I walked off the pitch in so much pain that I couldn’t tell who was walking me out. It only took some minutes for me to realise that Mr Johnson, a member of staff whose presence at the game was very much an act of serendipity as the fact that he had experienced such situations often enough to know how potentially serious this could get, was the one who received me at the touchline.
Being a regular visitor of the grounds on which we were playing, Mr Johnson knew precisely who to talk to, and in no time, we had found a first-aid giver who made the first attempt at a finger reduction. Given the gravity of the dislocation, it was no surprise that he was not very successful, and with his advice, we were hospital-bound. In yet another act of serendipity, Mr Johnson had his car, so my pain was not the least aggravated by the urgent need to arrange transportation. In just a few minutes, I had gone from savouring adrenaline to being helped into the passenger seat and reciting Invictus countless times to take my mind off the pain.
In about an hour and minutes, we visited three clinics before a General Practitioner recommended us to a hospital that had an orthopaedic. After waiting in vain for the orthopaedic, we had no choice but to meet a General Practitioner again. This other General Practitioner, backed by a poorly taken X-ray that did not show the persistent dislocation, diagnosed a sprain and prescribed painkillers, a rub, and bandaging. As he drove me from pharmacy to pharmacy in search of the specific items my General Practitioner, who had just come from Sudan and used Google Translate to move from Arabic names to English names had prescribed, Mr Johnson was convinced against all evidence presented by the X-ray and insisted that I make all efforts to meet an orthopaedic the next day.
In hindsight, had there not been a first-aid giver brave enough to attempt a finger reduction on what looked like a dislocation from Mars, I should have gone to bed without meeting an orthopaedic. That was serendipity, and it was beautiful.
After a night of intense pain and some painkillers, I left home very early in the morning, on a Sunday, to a specialist hospital with the hope of meeting an orthopaedic. In less than 10 minutes of my arrival at the hospital, I was in the room with an orthopaedic. After inspecting my finger vis-a-vis the X-ray, he declared the X-ray to have been poorly done and asked for another. Unfortunately, the X-ray at the hospital malfunctioned, and I was referred to a second hospital.
After completing my X-ray at the second hospital, the orthopaedic was so kind as to come to the second hospital to complete the final reduction, this time with anaesthesia.
Well, that is too much for my finger as I am more interested in the aftermath of this accident.
Going into the mid-semester week, I had two assignments, work deadlines to meet, and a three-day conference I badly wanted to attend. At this point, I need not point out that I could not do any of those. Coming to terms with my inability to stick to my vision for the mid-semester break was very painful. I kept blaming myself for my involvement in a game that should have been none of my business and slowly descended into gloomy indecision.
Each day, upon waking up, I will mentally catalogue everything that I thought I should have done the previous day, add that to what I thought was to be done on the day, and then spend each waking moment torturing myself with the thought that I should have done so-so and so thing by now, had I not played football. It did not help that I struggled to make my bed, keep my clothes in order, and even shower. My room became an example of the type of room I had sworn I could never live in, and as I learned to sleep in a bed that I had previously thought should be remade, I realised that I should stop resisting and start living.
On Wednesday night of my mid-semester break, I felt so empty and purposeless that I wrote to a friend that I was done pitying myself and would go to work the next day. I went to bed early and woke up early, but then something changed when I woke up. I found myself way too content with my station in the morning, and I managed to convince myself that I was no less for not doing the things I said I would do. After all, I committed to doing those things without foresing this accident, and while my person will bid me not to make any excuses, not to appreciate the severity of the accident and be grateful for how lucky I am for the progress I have made will be being stubborn without cause.
Early this morning, as I opened my windows, I caught myself smiling at the thought that this is perhaps the happiest, most optimistic and most energised I have been in a while. I asked myself why. It didn’t take long for me to find an answer.
This week, I have had more sleep than I have had in forever; I have lived at a pace so slow that it was scary at times; I have spent the most time communicating with the people who matter the most in my life; I have enjoyed the things that I usually will be too serious to enjoy (I got obsessed with Rugby); I have taken the time to eat very well; and I have not created artificial pressure for myself.
Would I have ever planned such a week for myself? Never.
The week is over; I did not attend my three-day conference; I did not go to the gym as often as I wanted to; I did not work on my projects, and yet the world and I are still here, and I am happy, thrilled indeed.
Many of us go through life thinking we must have a plan. We sometimes fail to realise that to have a plan is to arrogantly seek to assert some control over a world that is more complex than we can ever fathom and that, more often than we may be willing to accept, we would have to let go of our plans without feeling less of ourselves.
We must learn to go with the flow.
Learning to go with the flow does not imply giving up on the enormous benefits we can reap from planning. Far be it from us to seek such an outcome. The most desirable outcome, I will say, is to realise that, like two total opposites in a “Bohric” system of complementarity, learning to live by a plan and learning to live with the flow are two approaches that only strengthen each other and make life more beautiful.
Serendipity in all its beauty is all over us. It will take a very sorry life for us to miss out on its calming powers by arrogantly insisting on our preconceptions of things and events. At the same time, serendipity is not everything, and there can be more.
In hindsight, I can say that my football accident was a beautiful, serendipitous event that forced me to slow down, to be humbled by needing to ask for help and to realise that I can be myself even when I do not meet my standards, and to appreciate that not everything is as important as we often make them. Sent a week back into the past, will I hope for this accident with all I know now? Certainly!
In the words of Leo Tolstoy, “They say; misfortunes and sufferings…yes, but if right now, right this minute they asked me; ‘Would you rather be what you were before you were taken prisoner, or go through all this again?’ For God’s sake let me again have captivity and horse flesh! We imagine that when we are thrown out of our familiar rut all is lost, but that is only when something new can begin. While there is life there is happiness. There is much, much before us.”