A New Home, A New Beginning

Welcome to the new home of the Serendipity Journal.

It has been a loooong time since I last posted.  Sorry.

Initially, my posting delay occurred because I was working to set up this new website.  Despite my best research efforts, my first experience into domain names and hosting services had more than a couple of major stumbles along the way.  The process I thought would take no more than two weeks, tops, took closer to two months of frustrating off-and-on-again work.  However, by the end of July I had cleared most of the technical hurdles and migrated the Serendipity Journal to this new website.

It was at that point that real-world issues took center stage in my life.  Here’s the Cliff Notes version: I’m still seeking full-time employment, I’ve moved in with a close friend while my wife and I are going through mediation for our marriage, and, in spite of our stuck relationship, Carol and I worked together to get our two college-age children financially and physically set-up for their first week of classes at Ohio State last week.

But all these excuses aside – and really, that’s all they are – the biggest reason why it has taken so long to publish this post  is my own embarrassment and unreasonable expectations.  As the days stretched into weeks, I vowed to write an excellent post to explain the delay.  I wanted that post to be full of wisdom and insight, and hoped it would somehow make up for the long delay. But nothing I could think to write seemed good enough, and the inspiration I kept hoping for refused to materialize.

The weeks stretched into months.  Each day delayed added further to the burden I had created for myself.

As you’ve no doubt surmised by this point, there won’t be any profound insights served up in today’s post.  Many of the “answers” that I’ve adopted over the past 48 years have failed in the face of the adversity experienced over the past few months.  In fact, I now seem to have many more questions than answers as I progress through life.

And, miraculously, this is a good place to be.

As Deepak Chopra points out in The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success, freedom lies in the “wisdom of uncertainty”:

“In the wisdom of uncertainty lies the freedom from our past, from the known, which is the prison of past conditioning.  And in our willingness to step into the unknown, the field of all possibilities, we surrender ourselves to the creative mind that orchestrates the dance of the universe.”

Ultimately, there wasn’t enough wisdom and insight in the world to make up for my posting delay.  Whose forgiveness was I seeking anyway?  In truth, it was my own self-judgement that caused this delay and the guilt I associated with it, nothing more.  It would have been more comfortable for me to serve up a post offering a great life-lesson drawn from my recent experiences, but at this point I’m too close to those experiences to hold any meaningful perspective.

So instead of insight, this post holds possibility.  The questions are there, just waiting to be explored.  And if we seek, we’ve been assured that we will find.

A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

Starting is half done.

Consider this post a start.