The Happy Accidents That Make Us Who We Are

By Stephen O’Connor

It’s interesting to consider all of those serendipitous events which bend the tree of our lives to grow in a certain direction, or that set us off, for good or ill, on roads where we find our lives. I like to think about those happy accidents that worked out in a fortuitous way—Dylan’s “simple twist of fate,” which earlier or more faithful writers may have seen as the workings of Providence.

Recently, I watched the documentary Zero Gravity, which tells the story of jazz saxophone legend and composer, Wayne Shorter. As a boy, Wayne was called into the principal’s office and asked why he was skipping school. After all, he was a bright student with a lot of potential. The boy explained that he skipped school to go to the movies because he liked the music. The principal considered this and sent for the music teacher. It was agreed that Wayne would join the school band. He was given a clarinet, his first instrument. Who could ever have imagined that this simple solution would lead to fame, a brilliant career with the likes of Art Blakey, Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock and all the jazz giants? That he might win ten Grammy Awards, put out twenty-five albums, make guest appearances with Carlos Santana, Joni Mitchel, Steely Dan and others? Is it possible that this genius would never have been uncovered if the boy had not had the meeting with the principal?

In a similar way, I remember reading that Niels Bohr, the Danish theoretical physicist, became interested in science because an uncle gave him a compass for Christmas. He wondered how it was that the needle, no matter where he stood, pointed in the same direction. He was told that there are invisible magnetic fields that blanket the earth which the small device could detect. He was fascinated. The Christmas gift was the catalyst for an interest in physics and a world-renowned career.

Jascha Heifetz at the age of three was given a miniature violin by his father. It turned out to be a gift to the entire world. Amelia Earhart had no interest in flying until she attended an air show in Long Beach, California in 1920, at which her father convinced her to take a ten-minute airplane ride. It was an exhilarating and life-altering experience for Earhart. Three years later, she had her pilot’s license, and though it all ended in a sort of Icarian tragedy, for a while, as Edna St. Vincent Milay might put it, her candle burned brightly and gave a lovely light.

Last week I heard Scott Simon interview Anthony Hopkins on NPR. The iconic actor related how, at his school, the students were required to report to the assembly hall one Saturday night to watch the film of Laurence Olivier’s “Hamlet.” He said that as Olivier recited the lines, “Oh that this too, too solid flesh would melt, thaw, resolve itself into a dew,” he had an epiphany. “Something in me clicked. I remember thinking, ‘That is what I want to do in my life.’” Twenty years later, he was Olivier’s understudy at the National Theatre. When Olivier went into the hospital, Hopkins stood in for him in Strindberg’s “Dance of Death.”

It is not just the famous who experience the simple twists of fate that shape human lives. We all experience them. A chance meeting here. A small decision there. A moment when we happen to encounter someone or something that resonates in our deepest selves.

Geert Lernout is a Belgian friend from our university days at UCD in Dublin. Geert was raised speaking Flemish, but had also learned French and German. English is his fourth distinct language, and he speaks it well with a soft accent.

I asked Geert at what point he became interested in learning English. He answered that when he was fifteen or sixteen, he chanced to see Orson Welles’ Othello on TV. He had only a bit of “Beatles English,” but he found Welles’ soliloquies, though incomprehensible, the most beautiful language he had ever heard. As Anthony Hopkins would say, something clicked. Motivated study ensued. He went on to earn a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto and became a university professor in Amsterdam and Antwerp, and one of the world’s foremost authorities on James Joyce.

We see a certain film, take a class with a certain professor, play for a particular coach, hear a musical performance, or encounter a talented practitioner of a craft or trade or art, or the art itself, and because of the timbre of our own natures at that moment in our lives, it is a transformative experience. My older brother Rory, while in high school, had to write a report on an American author. So it was that I began to read the note cards he had left on the desk in our room, and eventually, his copy of Walden. Within a year, I was totally immersed in Thoreau and considered myself a young transcendentalist. My world view was fundamentally altered. I honestly don’t know who I would be if I had not happened on those writings.

We’re left to wonder. Personal transformation, like love, is unanticipated. As the Beatles sang:

Had it been another day
I might have looked the other way
And I’d have never been aware

I daresay most of us have been lucky enough to encounter such books, such people, such events or such art. The result may not be the world fame of Wayne Shorter or Amelia Earheart, but it is a profound and consequential experience that leaves us changed, and perhaps even awestruck, as Keats once was in reading Chapman’s translation of Homer.

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star’d at the Pacific—and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.