Creativity and Its Connection to Serendipity

  While I was working on my video project tonight as one of the last assignments for my Media/Evangelism course, I felt initially frustrated. Something about the story arc that I composed for this piece felt really weighted down and cumbersome. But it no longer seemed like I could start the whole project from scratch. Not only did I seem to run out of new ideas on where to go with it, but I also felt so frustrated with the process that I saw myself disengaging from the pain of frustration.
   It was that moment that I decided to take a rest and start looking at some potential music pieces that I could add as a soundtrack for the video. I experimented with a few of the songs by playing them alongside the video to 'try them on' as it were. Again, I wasn't too thrilled about the choices at first--and there was one particular piece called "Sad Day" which seemed simple yet effective enough to carry my story along. The funny thing is that Sad Day was only 2 minutes 28 seconds long, while my video project was over 3 minutes!...so I knew I had to cut things here and there if I wanted to use this song without looping it indefinitely. But what I didn't realize at the time was that the very moment when the song ended, I realized that this point is exactly where the video needs to be cut. In fact, the accidental aspect of this discovery (also called "serendipity") sent a chill down my spine...it is as though the accident itself knew better than I did about where the video needs to be cut!
   Sometimes..well, I would have to say that in many unacknowledged cases, serendipity can serve to move people along when they have run out of solutions or new ways of looking at problems. Without the ability to entertain accidents and even see their potential to add unexpected good things to what a person is doing, there may not even be so many things completed as they are. It is certainly as though there is an intelligence in the universe that works through people, rather than leaving it up to people to decide or determine things through their own intellect.