Quirkbag Collection #57 – 30.08.26
6 years ago, I just got Netflix for the first time. Back then, I had no clue how much my life would be shaped by the characters and stories there. So much of our lives are shaped by forces we cannot see, by decisions we forgot we made, and by the hands of serendipity. If there were a way to experiment and observe life, we would learn just how much serendipity occurs.
But I guess the closest we will get is season 3 of “The Good Place” (which honestly is good enough for me).
What Are Friendships?
Not all of us are part of a 6-people friend group who often gathers at a cafe under our apartment in the city of New York. Not all of us have a loose cannon oddball jester in the friend group called Kramer either. Most of us have to squeeze our calendar to meet old friends from different phases of our lives, let alone to meet new people and make new friends. Of course, consider yourself lucky if you have a standing social meet up regularly. But realistically, have we been overly romanticising friendship?
What defines a friend is completely subjective. Is it someone you always talk to? Someone that you text everyday? Or is it someone that you share a flat with? What about best friends? Or are there just friends in a group?
Friends are like books. The more you have, the more space required. Eventually, you run out of space and time to store and fully relish in them. Fortunately, books’ value lie not in their volume but in the life-changing substance they offer. The best friendships are the ones that give you hope; that offer you solace when the world fails to provide; that lights a small candle flame in the dark night. It can be someone to sit silently with, being present in the moment.
If anything, friendships are not collectibles. It’s easy to look at classic sit-coms and wish we all had friends like Friends. Indeed, how fun that would be. Reality can be brutal when it comes to friendships. Without tending to (newer) friendships like a small fire, a gust of wind is all it takes to extinguish the friendship. Before we know it, what we thought were (strong) friendships are just people we used to know.
What Does It Take To Hold A Friendship?
With the few treasured friends we have, how do we keep them? Surely, we cannot let serendipity have its way with a budding new connection or one that has borne fruit.
Friendships used to be easy in Primary school. You sat next to someone and if you both played the same video game, the same sport or took the same school bus, you made a new friend in a week. You would meet daily in class, and the friendship blossomed.
I used to get the advice that “secondary school is where you make life long friends”. But that comes with a caveat: if you choose to lean into serendipity. The older we get, the more control we have to seal ourselves off personally and emotionally. We no longer bond as freely as we did as kids. Without leaning into serendipity and connecting with someone new, there will always be a perimeter around you distancing yourself from others. If you so choose, no one makes it past the perimeter. Slowly, superficial connections fade and drift into the abyss.
We wonder what happened to those “friends” we used to talk to. Especially as an adult, proximity is an advantage we no longer have and school, believe it or not, is a luxury platform we no longer belong in. We are on our own, with serendipity.
These days, friendships take up energy, like most relationships do. But hopefully you picked the right people so the relationships give more energy than they take. They say the best relationships take work. Indeed, it takes work to prevent the forces of reality from pulling people apart, just as these same forces created your one-in-a-billion encounter. To hold a friendship requires mutual effort and both sides need to recognise this.
Serendipitous Friendships and Their Fate
Imagine you meet someone the way Kate Beckinsale did in Serendipity, just by sheer chance of picking the same glove as another stranger. Setting fiction aside, we tend not to notice the way serendipity occurs in our lives. Sure, we call “luck” at play, but really, they are but two faces of the same coin. We all experience serendipity and it nudges our lives in a slight direction. But one small nudge can go a long way, as Serendipity shows.
Serendipity is a quirk of the universe. It holds us in its palm, waiting to subtly influence us. The magic, however, lies in whether or not we take action after knowing about its presence. What do we do once we learn the odds are stacked against us? That the chance encounter might be once in a lifetime? People in our lives come and go. The truth is we never really know who are ones that will stay for a long time, until that long time has passed. Suddenly conversations revolve around key words like “those days” or “back then”.
The ironic part about serendipity is that we have to play the cards we are dealt and yet, we barely get to choose what happens with those cards. We wish we could secure friendships with the new people we meet, to seed friendships into fruition. But in reality, the most we get is “Hello” and “Bye” – “Hi-Bye” friends. These are the ghosts of our friendships from serendipity.
Setting aside the feasibility of maintaining huge numbers of friendships, one can only imagine how much more diverse and interesting life would be if we experienced just a fraction of all these serendipitous connections. We never know where we would end up just by the friendship with one new person.
The Tapestry of (University) Life
Our lives take funny turns. You never know when you might meet a new person who would become someone important. The tapestry of life is just that – a series of coincidences interwoven with our actions to create our experience in this world. Of course, we choose our actions and we decide our direction. But all that happens in the context of an environment hardly of our choosing. The rest that comes along is serendipitous and a lesson to be learnt.
University is a great place to meet new people. It is a very exclusive and special phase of 4 years when being a “student” confers some unique advantages. People see potential in you and invitations to events are plastered. Committees are open to applications, communities need members. Social circles overlap like lunar eclipses, except far more frequently. Serendipity is at an all-time high should you choose to lean into it.
The culture is such that you never know who you might meet at any point in time, doing something you never thought you would be doing. It is anyone’s guess where that would lead you in life if you let serendipity broaden your horizon. Again, only if you choose to drop the perimeter and lean into it.
Perhaps the greatest twist is that serendipity can work its magic over years. What might appear trivial today could be the very experience you draw on years later. A reunion with someone you have yet to meet might be in order 15 years from now. Reconnecting with someone you met last week 10 years later might set your life in a new direction. For all the people we never meet, or the serendipity we never had, we just might deny ourselves the fine tapestry life has to offer.
Friendships Age Like Fine Bordeaux
Not all wines are created equal, everyone knows that. Friendships are not all created equal either. Sometimes, we come to the end of a friendship’s lifespan (and yes, regrettably so). No one knows when that might be, but an amicable goodbye (or until next time) is a friendship well-lived.
For the lucky ones, we have best friends, friends of decades. These are friendships that have aged like fine wine, growing stronger and deeper than ever. And yes, once in a while we look back and think “it’s been a long way since…” Nostalgia is a good sign of a long-lasting friendship. Like a good book, it changes your life and you always go back to it.
Just as how fine wine is not fine because there is an infinite source of it, a friendship’s beauty is not in its immortality. Instead, it is knowing that friendships will not be forever that makes every moment spent, every experience shared and every story told all the more precious.
The beauty of friendship is in the being.
It is fate that we met; it is up to us to make the most of it.
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Hi! I’m Zac, the guy behind this serendipitous, quirky blog. I’m currently on a quest to find out more about myself – who I am and what life has to offer. This blog is my little space where I step out of my comfort zone to share my thoughts and life experiences. I hope you enjoy reading the weekly posts. Share them if you like, or not.
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