September 2021
A few weeks ago, a friend and I went whale watching off Byron Bay. The day started auspiciously enough when we drove out to the dive shop. Things were going well. We arrived in good time and found a car parking spot fairly close by. At the shop we watched a video on what we might see out on the boat, piled in a bus and headed off to The Pass where the boat was launched by a four wheel drive. The plan was to walk through the shallows and climb into the boat, but first the car had to leave the beach. It couldn’t. It was bogged. The tide was coming up, which didn’t look promising. Another 4WD turned up to get the first one out of the shallow water, but, lo that got bogged as well. A small towing truck turned up to help, and successfully pulled the second 4WD out of the shallows. We cheered. Inexplicably, so I thought, the second 4WD and not the truck went back down to retrieve the first car, which by then, was practically drifting away. The first car was saved, and remarkably still driveable, and the second car went back into the shallows to retrieve the trailer that was partially submerged. That was saved and it and all three vehicles headed back up the beach to the road and away.
The tide was coming up and the waves were getting bigger as we, an hour later, waded to the boat. We got aboard and started getting really drenched as the waves crashed on top of us, but we decided to continue the planned expedition out to sea. Turtles swam by, dolphins appeared and disappeared and reappeared, and we saw breaching whales rising and diving as we travelled beyond Julian Rocks. We followed them to the edge of the marine park that is out there and delighted in all the life around us. It was truly wonderful.
It was, though, getting really late, and so it was decided to return to shore. And so we did. I was hungry, weak with hunger actually, having had only a light breakfast many hours before, so on getting out of the boat I promptly fell into the water. It seems this was serendipity at work for we could not eat at a particular Japanese restaurant as planned, or in fact anywhere in Byron because I was drenched; socially unacceptably wet all over.
Now it turns out that this restaurant that we couldn’t go to was the same one visited by a Sydney man and his two sons on the same day around the same time. This little family, it turns out had the covid19 virus. If we had been there, we would have had to be in quarantine for two weeks; or worse, we could’ve got sick. Getting too wet effectively saved us from that happening.
Serendipity, finding the fortunate while not even trying, feels like a gift. I certainly am very glad of it, but…
It is easy at such times to try to read much more into such things than may be there. I am, by nature, am not inclined to do so. I do not appeal to divine interventions nor other grand schemers, preferring, instead, to determine what I need to do at the time and more or less accept things as they arise and deal with them thoughtfully. I see life as an experiment where we do not really know the outcomes, but where we can explore, test, and examine what happens next. There is life and there is death, for sure, and we are capable of making choices, but there are also things that happen serendipitously. What happened for me could well have been caused by nothing more than an inadequate and too early breakfast. Maybe.
Serendipity, or not, our task, my task, is to act with awareness; to be present and conscious in this beautiful world we are part of, and to be responsible for self, and others as fellow free agents.
