Serendipity and Active Listening

 This afternoon a reporter asked if serendipity played a role in my career? LOL. My entire LIFE is one big river of serendipity. I rattled off about 10 incidences of a seemingly random thing leading to a big break or a job or a connection in an impossibly twisty way. The only thing I have observed in seeing other ppl who have a preternatural ability to win luck/chance/fate on to their side is that most of them are active listeners. Not just with their professors and or bosses, but the busboy and the store clerk and someone cussing me out, their children, their mom, high-low status, people sleeping on the street. I think we are constantly being thrown bread crumbs, hints, clues to something larger, but most of the time we are so used to listening to ppl with authority or acclaim, that we miss the other 99% of things that are happening.  I've known many brilliant artists who seem to be so filled with ego or prejudice or status-chasing that they can't hear the whispers of muses. They are waiting for Steven Spielberg to call them when their next door neighbor is the person who could change their life. The real rocket fuel isn't in chasing famous people you don't know, it's the person right in front of you. Stay in the present moment with the people right in front of you. That's the magic. Serendipity was the the theatre usher at intermission who told me that she was sending her black political plays to London, that clued me into sending OBAMA-OLOGY and DON'T SMOKE IN BED their to be produced. It was a colleague on private chat who casually mentioned 'well if you want to go to NYC you could get an MFA as an excuse to be there' that got me looking. It's the ESPN football announcer who said 'Autry takes the handoff' that perked up my ears as high school student b/c that was my middle name. And then I looked at the team's purple and black uniforms and searched my college guide book for Northwestern. It was a visiting journalism professor lecturing his own students that they should be taking advantage of their internships and 'If you're not writing articles, you're wasting your time' that activated me to go back to my local paper and demand to write an article that turned into a small gig, that turned into writing for 3 local newspapers and 2 online magazines by the time I graduated high school. These were all things that activated me from stasis that came from having my antennae up. I had no idea when I was talking to the usher or watching college football or sitting in on a college journalism course, that I would be given 'a key' to something. I had no idea when a friend asked me to stop by a holiday party that I would be given a leftover Secret Santa gift... a Louis Armstrong biography. A few months later I had no idea when a friend asked me to stop by his apartment on my LA tour that I would mention the Louis Armstrong bio and that would lead to meeting the exec producers of ENTOURAGE and pitching a jazz series, getting contacts, and diving into the history of jazz. And I had no idea that years and years later, I would be sitting at lunch when Michel at Miami New Drama asked me 'so what do you know about Louis Armstrong?' And I laughed, 'are you kidding me?'

Serendipity. Providence. Fate. It's all there. We just have to listen to the world like a jazz musician, flowing with the notes and waiting for the right moment to jump in.

WINS AND LOSSES

I don't see things in 'win's' and losses until much later. In the moment I don't think you can define what's happening to us in those terms b/c often you don't know how things are going to turn out. It's listening and taking in new info and then being willing to look at it in different ways. Even the so called 'wins' (spouse, house, a seemingly great job) can turn out to be huge 'losses' depending on how one deals with them. I've seen ppl turn a 'win' into a loss purely by their attitude of greed or adultery or jealousy. Conversely I've seen ppl turn a 'loss' into a 'win' with kindness, love, generosity...which goes to show that the definition of 'wins' and 'losses' has no nature from its own side and shifts over time. The only thing we do have control over is how we take things. 

Serendipity doesn't mean one leads a life without painful or that seemingly bad things don't happen. Also the idea that life is this perfectly balanced 'win' over here equals 'losses' over here implies that there's finite pie of good and bad. What has been shown over time in quantum physics multiverse and buddhism and even capitalism is that there is no such thing as a finite anything. In the late 90s the American economy was booming and there was an assumption that you had to scramble to get 'the money' available. Then the internet took off and an entirely new stream of wealth was created. The concept of wealth exploded....and then the attention-based economy of social media took off and now you have ppl earning a million dollars for doing makeup videos in their home. 

The social media influencer isn't withdrawing money from a pool of wealth that someone else is going to pay for...they have tapped into an infinite potential and made funny videos or makeup or whatever. The concept of 'a limited' doesn't exist in higher sciences or spiritualities. It's just looking at it in a different way...aka the mode of an active listener to not define something as 'good' or 'bad' in a stuck way. And then finally, removing that concept of 'limited supply' removes the most damning thing that humans do: morally judging material things. So the concept of I have this b/c I'm godly favored or whatever, or I lack this b/c the universe doesn't like me is false. In no way is noting serendipity an indictment of ppl who have led less that pleasant lives. There is no moral judgment b/c -ultimately- these material things are an illusion. They have no nature from their own side, they are not good or bad, they come and go, and you have something for a minute and then it passes on. The lack of moralizing things leads to lack of grasping to seemingly good things and therefore one can let it go and be open to new information that can be interpreted in 'good' and bad' ways as long as the viewer knows that this is a temporal interpretation...it will shift over time, it has no nature from its own side, and I am projecting into it. There is no punishment, there is no 'finish line' in the material world...all things are lost, even our own bodies. So we can loosen our grip of 'winning and losing.' We can open our ears and hear advice and tips from anyone and everywhere b/c there is equanimity and balance in how the watcher is taking in information, as oppose to believing there is a so-called 'balance' in the universe. There is not a balance in the universe like that. But there is a balance in seemingly buoyant ppl being able to reinterpret, remix, and listen. The equanimity lies in the active listener.

NOT FAKE OPTIMISM

One person's worst scenario would be a blessing to another person or in another society. One person's perfect would be a terrible trap to someone else. This is not a self-help call for optimism or positive thinking. I agree that just optimism and vision boards of your dreams do not work This is just saying being an active listener and aware of ultimate nature of reality allows things to be more flexible, less fixed. In the moment when something is happening, I don't have control over a situation. For instance if I'm getting beaten up I can't 'pretend' it's fine or be optimistic about the beatdown. False optimism is as toxic as pessimism. But the serendipity I'm talking about doesn't come from being 'happy go lucky.' It comes from just being open and available as much as possible...to whatever I am capable of in the moment. Some of the biggest changes in my life have happened out of very uncomfortable situations of racism, homophobia, classism as well as health related things. I grew up with severe asthma and on oxygen tanks most summers...that's why I read more than the avg child. But it wasn't like I was sitting there wheezing with an oxygen tank and thinking 'cheer up and be positive' about this terrible pain that doctor's said I was going to have for life. it merely meant I was sitting there, looked around, picked up a book, and did something with my time. I didn't want to wallow in kids getting to play outside while I sat in a cold living room...I just switched from what I didn't have -normal body, lungs, playing with kids- to what was in front of me: well, these books are here. Active listening and being available to adjustment allows for me to see the bread crumbs. I don't always know where they lead but I become a willing improv player.

BE HERE NOW

No matter the physical circumstances, ppl are capable of being present, being in the moment, listening, observing, and responding without falling into a moral narrative. There's a scene in my play Obama-ology about a police stop that actually happened to me. At 2 AM a police car followed me out of Obama campaign headquarters in Cleveland. White cop. Blk passenger/volunteer was freaking out. We got pulled over. It was heated. The cop was yelling, my passenger was getting upset and started yelling back. It was 2008 and this is before cell phone videos became prominent but I was very aware that I could be shot. That was a possibility as the cop's hand was on his holster. And I stopped in the middle of all this anger and just observed this cop. I shifted perspective, meditated on equanimity, waited. I didn't know if he was going to come back and arrest us or abuse us. It was 2am and no one was around. He came back to the car, handed my license to me, apologized, wished me a good night. I wished him a good night. My passenger was freaked out that had never happened to him before. The situation was DE-ESCALATED. It wasn't perfect or good...it was shifted. But the situation would not have been de-escalated if I would have fallen into the narrative that 'he was a racist fucking pig cop, we're blk ppl, this is bullshit, I should be upset.' I would have gotten upset and responded in kind with that narrative. Instead I just decided that 'what if I just listened and reacted to what was happening right now and not the narrative in my head?' No guarantees that things would turn out correctly. Bad stuff could still happen. But what if I just paid attention to right now instead of the cop narrative in my head and based on past history?