Serendipity: The faculty or phenomenon of finding valuable or agreeable things not sought for – Merriam-Webster
This is a story about that one time, not long ago, when I – we, really, my wife and I – found something we desperately needed, when we weren’t looking for it. It happened while we were on holiday in Berlin, the week before last.
The story starts on the day we arrived. We got an early flight out, and by midday we'd checked into our hotel. As expected, we began holidaying by seeing the sights and taking in the lovely city, all the while keeping in the back of our minds that we needed to find a nice spot for dinner, preferably a few nice spots, so we'd have a few options for the duration of our time there. Now, if you're thinking, finding a nice place for dinner seems easy enough, you'd be right, except for two things.
First, we hadn't done our homework. I imagine that normal people look up restaurants and local attractions in the days and weeks leading up to their holiday, especially when visiting a foreign country whose language they don't speak. This is all a part of the build up and anticipation in the run up to a holiday. I know this because it constitutes a small but not insignificant finding of my PhD research, in the context of cultural heritage exploration. Normal people like to know what to expect, they like to visualise the good time they'll have on holiday, and they like to plan accordingly to avoid disappointment and the sort of discomfort that uncertainty can bring. But of course, I'm not normal, so I didn't look up any places to eat in Berlin before flying out.
I really should have done so, I really should've done my homework, because of the second thing – my dietary requirements. I may or may not have mentioned it previously on this blog, but people who know me know that I'm vegan, which means more often than not, the food (and sometimes drinks) on offer in unfamiliar territories tend not to be on the table for me, which is all the more reason to do my homework, as a normal person would. But as we've established, I'm not normal. So there we were, strolling around the streets of Berlin, with what we now considered to be our primary, utmost mission – finding a place to eat – and it wasn't going well. We'd been told by a close friend that Berlin is “vegan heaven”, and we'd be spoilt for choice. On reflection, this might explain our lackadaisical attitude towards sorting out places to eat beforehand. But as the afternoon sun faded below the horizon and the evening clouds hung over the erstwhile blue skies, our mission became more urgent and simultaneously less successful. Either this place was the furthest thing from vegan heaven, or we'd somehow ended up looking in the parts of the city that wanted nothing to do with plant-based establishments and their patrons.
We were getting tired, and hungry, and the only thing that could remedy the situation we'd found ourselves in was some nice, plant-based food. As dinner time approached without a viable option, we took “nice” off the table. We just wanted food we could eat, just edible food that didn’t have animals or animal products in it. By chance, we found a place about two minutes from our hotel. It was a place we'd walked by a few times while scoping out the culinary offerings of the city, but it was one we'd dismissed each time. It wasn't a vegan establishment by any means, but on close examination of the menu posted outside the main entrance, they did have two vegan items on offer. At first, we were sceptical, leading us to approach the front doors with the tentativeness of a puppy sniffing out a treat held out by a stranger on the streets. The dishes turned out to be lovely, dare I say, a wonderful introduction to Berlin's culinary landscape. We arrived back at our hotel with full bellies and a renewed determination to look up vegan places online for lunch and dinner the next day. I told myself I'd have a few options sorted out before leaving the hotel in the morning.
But I didn't. It would've been too easy, and far be it from me to take things easy on holiday. In fairness, we did try to look things up, but our search queries yielded nothing helpful, “helpful” being a place whose menu appealed to us and happened to be within walking distance. And so day two of our holiday began with the same uncertainty that characterised most of day one. Still, it was all well and good, I told myself. The day was young, and dinner was a long time away. Plus, if all else failed, we knew of a place with lovely vegan variants of schnitzel and currywurst we could always fall back on. With that back up plan in our pockets, we set about taking in more of the sights. We explored the museum island, saw the Brandenburg gate, visited a Berlin wall monument, and made plans to visit a guitar shop. And then my wife had the idea to find a nice park to relax and take in the sun. We had to look up a nice park to go to, of course, so we set our phones to the task. And they delivered.
This is where the story took a turn, because as we navigated our way to the nearest park which looked like it met our requirements, the map spotlighted the sorts of vegan places we'd searched for without success for the better part of the previous day. There we were, trying to find a park online, having given up on our search for vegan places, and as it happened, we not only found a vegan bakery a stone's throw from our intended park destination, but also a vegan burger joint for dinner later on, and a few back up options if that wasn't up to par. Some of these places we'd found on the map were right under our nose too, situated in areas we'd explored frantically the previous evening. In other words, having searched far and wide without success the day before and that morning, by mid afternoon, seemingly by chance, we'd stumbled upon an abundance of vegan places, which were there all along. It wasn't what we were explicitly looking for just then, but my goodness it was what we sorely needed.
On reflection, and with the benefit of hindsight, I don't think our discovery came down to chance or luck. Sure, one could argue that there's always an element of luck when something good happens, but when I think back to our activities, I realise that we broadened our surface area through all the walking and futile online searching we did. Technology, for all its flaws, can be truly helpful at times, and this was one of those times, because our phones knew where we were – courtesy of all the location data it collected while we were walking, and what we wanted – courtesy of all the data we volunteered in the form of our search history the previous day. Having done all that leg work – more than 25,000 steps – and made our intentions abundantly clear – a dozen searches for vegan food in various forms – there we were, now spoilt for choice.
Trivial as all this may seem, the experience stayed with me for days, so much so that here I am, nearly two weeks later, writing 1,500 words about it. And just when I thought I'd figured it all out, I stumbled on a quote by novelist Hermann Hesse, courtesy of James Clear, which encapsulates this distinction between seeking something and finding it…
"When someone is seeking, it happens quite easily that he only sees the thing that he is seeking; that he is unable to find anything, unable to absorb anything, because he is only thinking of the thing he is seeking, because he has a goal, because he is obsessed with his goal. Seeking means: to have a goal; but finding means: to be free, to be receptive, to have no goal...for in striving towards your goal, you do not see many things that are under your nose.” – Hermann Hesse
I wish I could end this post with some profound epiphany or impressive lesson, but alas I have none. Sometimes you search for something desperately and you don’t find it, maybe because of the choices and decisions you make, maybe because you're so laser focussed that it becomes too difficult to see what's under your nose, maybe because of circumstances beyond your control, maybe because it's just not available, or maybe because there’s something better in store for you. Sometimes you never find it. But sometimes, when you least expect, that thing you wanted all along gets laid out on a silver platter at your table. Maybe there’s a lesson in there after all.
This post is not (just) about vegan food.
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