When I was 15, I was obsessed with a restaurant called Serendipity 3 (or III) in New York City. I must have seen it on Food Network or in Teen Vogue, mesmerized by its $1000 gold-leaved ice cream sundae. It also holds other accolades such as being a hangout spot for Marilyn Monroe and the set of several well-known rom-coms, which was apparently less impressive to me back then. But I begged my parents to take my sister and me there and puppy-dog-eyed my way into nearly one hundred dollars worth of desserts on our family’s 2012 tour of East Coast colleges. The let-down of “Frozzzzen Hot Chocolate” (just a slushie with cocoa powder) was a bigger disappointment than my subsequent rejection from Columbia. Teenage priorities.
In the fall of 2023, I spent several hours each weekend on a ‘path to spiritual creativity” with Julia Cameron’s best-selling book of writing exercises. One of the weekly practices was to write down instances of ‘synchronicity’ that I’d experienced. Most of my entries were very sincere “Yes! But I can’t remember!,”’s or vague “I met this girl and we had something in common”’s, much to 2024 Peyton’s chagrin.
There is one synchronicity entry with enough detail for me to recall, a Friday evening in September. After a day that left me emotionally and mentally drained, I trudged up the stairs in my house with major FOMO and a pang of embarrassment at the thought of admitting to my roommate that I had no plans for the evening, even though all I wanted to do was jump into bed and watch Seinfeld. But what I found at home were three girls in the same state of exhaustion, sitting on my living room floor and getting ready to order Indian takeout. They welcomed me and my tandoori order into their circle and we had the most needed recharge night.
Ellison and I doing anything other than Algebra
My high school best friend’s mom used to tell us that “luck is where preparation meets opportunity”. Until this writing, I thought she was ripping off Legally Blonde, but turns out it’s attributable to Seneca. Not that Elle Woods isn’t philosophical canon in her own right. The quote was often used in response to my friend claiming luck was on her side for algebra tests as we spent hours flipping through video feeds on Omegle. We swore we’d found Snoop Dogg on the site and were trawling through video feeds to meet another celebrity. Unfortunately, we were mostly learning with horror what penises of every shape, size, age, and angle looked like.
A recently re-aired 2009 episode of Radiolab titled ‘Stochasticity’ tried to dismantle the magic of serendipity using numbers, but those pesky statisticians can’t fool me. What were the odds that I’d be walking past Buckingham Palace just as the news that the Queen died broke and reporters flooded the royal grounds? Or that the Saturday I visited New York City during a summer internship and walked 20 miles crisscrossing the city I’d randomly bump into a visiting childhood friend in SoHo? Or that a spontaneous visit to a taiyaki shop in the Hague would lead to a lifelong friendship with a woman stopping by on her way home from pottery class.
Serendipity, synchronicity, luck, and stochasticity. Despite the annoying alliterative disruption by ‘luck,’ these concepts all dance around unexpected moments of joy and connection that life throws our way. Perhaps you and I have had our own moments of happy happenstance together– coincidentally visiting the same cities at the same time, reconnecting after years without seeing each other through a random Instagram story, or clicking when we figured out we have a similar niche hobby.
So, friends! For me: be on the lookout for these not-statistically-impossible but still-slightly-magical moments. Sometimes they can be a bit disorienting, like running into your hairdresser on the train. Or sometimes as simple as finding out your favorite brand of peanut butter is on sale when you’ve just run out. But if you’re really serendipitous synchronistic lucky or stochastic, they’re the occasions that bring you a little closer to loved ones, old or new.