Serendipity: The occurrence and development of events
by chance in a happy or beneficial way.

Don’t you just I love it when things fall perfectly into place in your life? Recently I had the most amazing and affirming experience of serendipity. Here is my story.

Ashvini suggested I create an E-Book for LFI; something to give away to encourage subscriptions. I loved the idea and was grateful to Ashvini for it but as I thought about it I wondered; how could I write an E-Book using the posts when so much of the value and the richness was contained in the conversation which followed the posts?

I procrastinated for a while (okay – a month) and then thought about it for a while and I finally came up with an idea that just might work. It would be a sort of Life FAQ with links to the posts. I worked on the draft and then put it aside to tackle the coding that would be needed to set it up.

I knew the process for distributing it needed to be automated but I’m not very tech savvy.   I was in over my head but I’m a reduce-it-to-it’s-simplest-form sort of person [Read: stubborn and independent]. I knew there had to be a way to accomplish this that was within my skill set. And I found it!

The solution was to create a page at LFI rather than a separate document that would need to be emailed.

I needed a title but before I could name it I had to know what it was! It was too small to be an E-Book but it had more substance than a Report. I closed my eyes and asked for help and from somewhere came inspiration.

I could call it “A Life User’s Manual”. It felt right. I went to Flickr to find a photo and put “manual” in the Search box. On the first page that came up was an interesting thumbnail of an open book. I clicked on it to get a better look and couldn’t believe what I saw. I rearranged the first two words in my title to match the one in the photo and created Life: A User’s Manual! Go see!

Have you ever experienced serendipity? Will you share your story?

photo credit: Whologwhy