Unexpected Encounters Quotes

Before we invented civilization our ancestors lived mainly in the open out under the sky. Before we devised artificial lights and atmospheric pollution and modern forms of nocturnal entertainment we watched the stars. There were practical calendar reasons of course but there was more to it than that. Even today the most jaded city dweller can be unexpectedly moved upon encountering a clear night sky studded with thousands of twinkling stars. When it happens to me after all these years it still takes my breath away.

We need not be afraid of expecting the unexpected, but let us wheedle each instant we enjoy and endear each happy moment we encounter; let us watch each step we take and each move we make, ever since happiness is a loving and appealing fairy, but utterly frail and vulnerable. ("Happy days are back again")

When we encounter the unexpected in our lives, we can challenge the battery of our interpretations and loosen our wearying preconceived notions if we keep exploring what we do not know, maintain an open mind, and take a balanced, dispassionate approach to life's vagaries. ("Looking for the unexpected")

The words were unexpected, but so incisively true. So much of prayer is like that - an encounter with a truth that has sunk to the bottom of the heart, that wants to be found, wants to be spoken, wants to be elevated into the realm of sacredness.

What if disappointment is really the exact appointment your soul needs to radically encounter God?

When we encounter an unexpected challenge of threat the only way to save ourselves is to hold on tight to the people around us and not let go.

I tried – and failed – to imagine Dr Bairstow chuckling. Sometimes when he was pleased, he did display the satisfaction of an elderly vulture unexpectedly encountering a dead donkey. But chuckling …

When seasoned by the subtleties of accident, harmony, favor, wisdom, and inevitability, luck takes on the cast of serendipity. Serendipity happens when a well-trained mind looking for one things encounters something else: the unexpected.

When two members of a family or two intimate friends are separated, and one goes abroad and one remains at home, the return of the relative or friend who has been travelling always seems to place the relative or friend who has been staying at home at a painful disadvantage when the two first meet. The sudden encounter of the new thoughts and new habits eagerly gained in the one case, with the old thoughts and old habits passively preserved in the other, seems at first to part the sympathies of the most loving relatives and the fondest friends, and to set a sudden strangeness, unexpected by both and uncontrollable by both, between them on either side.

It was an unexpected encounter that slowly altered the course of my life.

We all go through hard times in life. It’s a part of being alive and it's the reality we all have to deal with. There are times we forget our value as a person because we are so blinded with these thoughts of loneliness, emptiness and ego. Somewhere along the road we become numbed with all the frustrations and dissatisfaction. But life itself isn't always about darkness and sadness, Life is also filled with colors and that makes it beautiful. Along this path of darkness there's always light waiting to be seen by our daunted hearts. Our heart is gifted to see this light. It may be hiding behind those circumstances that we encounter; in a stranger we just met at an unexpected place; a family who has been always there but you just ignored because of your imperfect relationship with them; it might be a long time friend you have or a friend you just met. Open your heart and you will see how blessed you are to have them all in your life. Sometimes they are the light that shines your path in some dark phases of life. Don't lose hope

Most things in the world are not unexpected if one thinks carefully about them. Even something one would call unusual—if one thinks about it, it’s really just a thing that was supposed to happen. Encountering unusual events often means you didn’t think things through.

When you meet a dark angel don't you ever for one minute believe they are bad because they have faced the worst demons and lived to guide you through yours. It really isn't an easy job they have been asked to do, but then neither was standing on the front line during the war in heaven.

But I can only pray ardently that Fortune walks with you, that you discover hitherto unimagined strength in yourself and encounter unexpected friends along this perilous path that you must now tread.

Almost every situation we encounter in life presents possibilities for growth...But these transformations require that a person be prepared to perceive unexpected opportunities.

I found out for the first time that things like this could happen. That a helping hand could be extended miraculously like that... you were the first one that taught me. Like all of these―" Nezumi slowly looked about his room. "―these thousand of stories here, you taught me that sometimes we encounter the most unexpected things. And that's why I was able to survive..." he lapsed into momentary silence. "So you're right. There are times when people are saved by other people. And you're the one that taught me that. You were the only one that taught me that. The debt I owe for that is high― unfortunately for me.

Our world is moving so fast and we are apt to miss so much of what is happening "right now." If we can put down our smart phones for one moment and be present to what is around us, I believe these incidental meetings and strangers who come into our lives can give us unexpected fortitude, perspective and even wisdom just when we need them the most - if we are just awake, aware and open to these new insights.

Perhaps a person gains by accumulating obstacles. The more obstacles set up to prevent happiness from appearing, the greater the shock when it does appear, just as the rebound of a spring will be all the more powerful the greater the pressure that has been exerted to compress it. Care must be taken, however, to select large obstacles, for only those of sufficient scope and scale have the capacity to lift us out of context and force life to appear in an entirely new and unexpected light. For example, should you litter the floor and tabletops of your room with small objects, they constitute little more than a nuisance, an inconvenient clutter that frustrates you and leaves you irritable; the petty is mean. Cursing, you step around the objects, pick them up, knock them aside. Should you, on the other hand, encounter in your room a nine thousand pound granite boulder, the surprise it evokes, the extreme steps that must be taken to deal with it, compel you to see with new eyes. Difficulties illuminate existence, but they must be fresh and of high quality.

But taking wrong trains, encountering unexpected delays, and suffering occasional mechanical breakdowns are inevitable to any journey really worth taking. One learns to get oneself turned around and headed the right way.

The greatest love stories are unexpected, unexplained... choreographed chaos played out in God’s timing. It feels like a chance encounter with a familiar stranger... Like a rekindling of an eternal flame.

Every other religion and philosophy says you have to do something to connect to God; but Christianity says no, Jesus Christ came to do for you what you couldn’t do for yourself.

The basic purpose of prayer is not to bend God’s will to mine but to mold my will into his.

When you encounter unexpected situation, don’t panic. Close our eyes, take a deep breath and pray. It will relief you of any anxiety.

Dad was a writer down to his cells, and he loved metaphors. Everything was a metaphor. Your dirty laundry could be one. Unexpected encounters with dog shit, definitely.

When seasoned by the subtleties of accident, harmony, favor, wisdom, and inevitability, luck takes on the cast of serendipity. Serendipity happens when a well-trained mind looking for one thing encounters something else: the unexpected.

I inherited the very best circumstances if all. And yet, circumstances can change. The natural trajectory of your life can be utterly disrupted by one unexpected encounter, setting you so wildly off course that you're not quite sure if you'll ever find your way back to the path you were on.

To the everlasting credit of the people of District 12, not one person claps. Not even the ones holding betting slips, the ones who are usually beyond caring. Possibly because they know me from the Hob, or knew my father, or have encountered Prim, who no one can help loving. So instead of acknowledging applause, I stand there unmoving while they take part in the boldest from of dissent they can manage. Silence. Which says we do not agree. We do not condone. All of this is wrong. Then something unexpected happens. At least, I don't expect it because I don't think of District 12 as a place that cares about me. But a shift has occurred since I stepped up to take Prim's place, and now it seems I have become someone precious. At first one, then another, then almost every member of the crowd touches the three middle fingers of their left hand to their lips and holds it out to me. It is an old and rarely used gesture of our district, occasionally seen at funerals. It means thanks, it means admiration, it means good-bye to someone you love.

But simple luck is the random birthright of the hapless. When seasoned by the subtleties of accident, harmony, favor, wisdom, and inevitability, luck takes on the cast of serendipity. Serendipity happens when a well-trained mind looking for one thing encounters something else: the unexpected. It comes from being in a position to seize opportunity from the happy marriage of time, place, and chance.

Serendipity happens when a well-trained mind looking for one thing encounters something else: the unexpected.

Our lives are like water, always flowing forward in the streams of time. When we encounter what is unexpected, our best choice is to flow around the obstacle.

We cannot be truly peaceful unless we have the invincible quality of peace within us; a feeble or temporary peacefulness could always be disturbed. If we try to be kind and peaceful in a naive way, encountering a different or unexpected situation might interfere with our awareness of peace because that peace has no strength in it, has no character. So peace must be stable, deeprooted, and solid.

Once, at one of the very rare and savory moments when my own teammates grudgingly allowed me to take the ball around one of the ends, Seymour, playing for the opposite side, disconcerted me by looking overjoyed to see me as I charged in his direction, as though it were an unexpected, an enormously providential chance encounter. I stopped almost dead short, and someone, of course, brought me down, in neighborhood talk, like a ton of bricks.

There’s no higher dream than experiencing God as He moves through every circumstance of life to an eternal encounter with Himself where transformed people will enjoy perfectly loving community around Jesus Christ, the source of Perfect Love.

Well, if you insist. But, my dearest flower, how ghastly to consider that such a mustache must shadow the clean-shaven grandeur of my domicile.' Lord Akeldama was rumored to insist that all his drones go without the dreaded lip skirt. The vampire had once had the vapors upon encountering an unexpected mustache around a corner of his hallway. Muttonchops were permitted in moderation, and only because they were currently all the rage among the most fashionable of London's gentlemen-about-town. Even so, they must be as well tended as the topiary of Hampton Court.

Most things in the world are not unexpected if one thinks carefully about them. Even something one would call unusual- if one things about it, it's really just a thing that was supposed to happen. Encountering unusual events often means you didn't think things through.

But Christianity is not just for the strong; it’s for everyone, especially for people who admit that, where it really counts, they’re weak.

Recognition hit Victoria like an unexpected encounter with a bat.

I have to trust that first comes the dust, and then comes the making of something even better with us. God isn’t ever going to forsake you, but He will go to great lengths to remake you. What if disappointment is really the exact appointment your soul needs to radically encounter God?

My memories of that time are fleeting, but they will never vanish completely, because the unexpected encounters of our lives will always remain with us, causing us great pain in the silent ways we evoke them.

When the ego is not, you are for the first time encountering your being. That being is void. Then you can surrender; then you have surrendered. There are thousands and thousands of stories… just by a touch, just by a look, someone became enlightened. And these minor surrenders prepare you for the total surrender. Once you have known that through surrender you receive something unknown, unbelievable, unexpected, never even dreamed of, then you are ready for a major surrender. And that is the work of the master – to help you in minor surrenders so that you can gather courage for a major surrender, for a total surrender.

He’s a part of your life and he’s part of the girls’ life. I’ll never ask you not to talk about him when I’m not around. I’ll never ask you to stop loving him. If he was here, I’d hate him.” I shake my head because that’s not true. “No, I probably wouldn’t know you if he was here, and for that I’m both thankful and remorseful because his girls are the best, most beautiful girls that I’ve ever encountered, and I want to do right by not only them, but him too.

to allow our hearts to break, to soften them, to sink deeply into the knowing that everything will fall, everything will pass, everything will crumble, can be the great portal to awakening. We simply stop taking everything for granted. We stop living in “tomorrow” and turn toward the living day. We stop seeking our happiness in the future, clinging to the promises of others, and begin to break open into a bigger happiness that is rooted in presence, and truth, that allows for the coming but also the going of things, that accepts the little deaths as they happen each day, the disappointments, the losses, the shattered expectations, the good-byes. The Unexpected becomes our friend, a constant companion. We break open into bitter-sweetness, into fragility and utter vulnerability, into the gift of every moment, of every encounter with a friend, a lover, a stranger.

So Jesus is a great model of how to live, pray, and relate to people. But remember that if Jesus is only a model for us, then he is no encouragement—for he is too good. No one could live up to his standard. Jesus came not just to be a model but a savior.

Ah, poems amount to so little when you write them too early in your life. You ought to wait and gather sense and sweetness for a whole lifetime, and a lone one if possible, and then, at the very end, you might perhaps be able to write ten good lines. For poems are not, as people think, simply emotions (one has emotions early enough)—they are experiences. For the sake of a single poem, you must see many cities, many people and Things, you must understand animals, must feel how birds fly, and know the gesture which small flowers make when they open in the morning. You must be able to think back to streets in unknown neighborhoods, to unexpected encounters, and to partings you had long seen coming; to days of childhood whose mystery is still unexplained, to parents whom you had to hurt when they brought in a joy and you didn’t pick it up (it was a joy meant for somebody else—); to childhood illnesses that began so strangely with so many profound and difficult transformations, to days in quiet, restrained rooms and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to nights of travel that rushed along high overhead and went flying with all the stars, and it is still not enough to be able to think of all that. You must have memories of many nights of love, each one different from all the others, memories of women screaming in labor, and of light, pale, sleeping girls who have just given birth and are closing again. But you must also have been beside the dying, must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open window and the scattered noises. And it is not yet enough to have memories. You must be able to forget them when they are many, and you must have the immense patience to wait until they return. For the memories themselves are not important. Only when they have changed into our very blood, into glance and gesture, and are nameless, no longer to be distinguished from ourselves—only then can it happen that in some very rare hour the first word of a poem arises in their midst and goes forth from them. - For the Sake of a Single Poem

Most things in the world are not unexpected if one thinks carefully about them. Even something one would call unusual—if one thinks about it, it’s really just a thing that was supposed to happen. Encountering unusual events often means you didn’t think things through. Your

When we encounter unexpected obstacles in finding out something which we wish to know, there are two possible courses to take. It may be that the right course is to treat the obstacle as a spur to further efforts; but there is a second possibility - that we have been trying to find something which does not exist. You will remember that that was how the relativity theory accounted for the apparent concealment of our velocity through the aether.

Just then the lightning blazed across the canopy of heaven, discovering the two rafts,—each to the other. In ten seconds more they were en rapport, and their respective crews congratulating each other, with as much joyfulness as if the unexpected encounter had completely delivered them from death and its dangers!

At the unexpected encounter with the final boss, Subaru felt as though his spirit was about to break. In terms of how mentally prepared he was to deal with either, meeting Elsa had much more of an impact on him than meeting Not-Satella. Subaru prayed that this was the last time he was going to have to see Elsa. “I

Like Nycteris, she thought, and cringed. There was an old fairy tale called The History of Photogen and Nycteris that she still carried a copy of. The main character in it was a young woman who had been raised by a cruel witch, inside a cave beneath a castle. The girl had grown up knowing only darkness, which at the time hadn’t seemed much of an issue to child-Devon. But the general idea was that Nycteris’s world was narrow: she thought the lamp in her cave was a sun, and that the universe was just a tiny series of rooms. She knew nothing of society and had very few books. A relatable situation, for a book eater woman. One day, Nycteris escaped her cave by following a stray firefly. She ended up in the castle garden. But her reactions in the story were strange and unexpected. Upon espying the moon for the first time, Nycteris decided that it must be a giant lamp, akin to the one in her cave. She saw the sky, and likewise decided it must be another kind of roof. And when she looked at the horizon, she saw not a limitless world, but merely another room, albeit with distant walls. The concept of outside didn’t exist for one such as Nycteris, nor could it ever. Her upbringing had given her such a fixed perspective that, even when encountering something new, she could only process it along the lines already drawn for her. The story’s complexity had baffled Devon as a child, but she understood it well enough now. The truth was, Nycteris never really escaped. Oh, she got a prince and a castle and the cruel witch died at the end. But Nycteris could not ever leave the cave, because the cave was a place in her mind; it was the entire way she thought about reality. Princesses like that couldn’t be rescued.

Everybody has got to live for something, but Jesus is arguing that, if he is not that thing, it will fail you. First, it will enslave you. Whatever that thing is, you will tell yourself that you have to have it or there is no tomorrow. That means that if anything threatens it, you will become inordinately scared; if anyone blocks it, you will become inordinately angry; and if you fail to achieve it, you will never be able to forgive yourself. But second, if you do achieve it, it will fail to deliver the fulfillment you expected. Let me give you an eloquent contemporary expression of what Jesus is saying. Nobody put this better than the American writer David Foster Wallace. He got to the top of his profession. He was an award-winning, bestselling postmodern novelist known around the world for his boundary-pushing storytelling. He once wrote a sentence that was more than a thousand words long. A few years before the end of his life, he gave a now-famous commencement speech at Kenyon College. He said to the graduating class, Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god . . . to worship . . . is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure, and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before [your loved ones] finally plant you. . . . Worship power, and you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. Look, the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they are evil or sinful; it is that they’re unconscious. They are default settings.4 Wallace was by no means a religious person, but he understood that everyone worships, everyone trusts in something for their salvation, everyone bases their lives on something that requires faith. A couple of years after giving that speech, Wallace killed himself. And this nonreligious man’s parting words to us are pretty terrifying: “Something will eat you alive.” Because even though you might never call it worship, you can be absolutely sure you are worshipping and you are seeking. And Jesus says, “Unless you’re worshipping me, unless I’m the center of your life, unless you’re trying to get your spiritual thirst quenched through me and not through these other things, unless you see that the solution must come inside rather than just pass by outside, then whatever you worship will abandon you in the end.

What both halves of my heart-mind can agree on is that I am the one who chooses how to respond to the people and situations I encounter everyday.

Life was strangely glorious like that sometimes; just as it could be cruel and unforgiving, so could it be a mysterious wonderland of unexpected joy and chance encounters.

We often forget how thirsty we are because we believe we will fulfill our dreams.

If there is a God, you owe him far more than a morally decent life. He deserves to be at the center of your life.

You may encounter unexpected circumstance. Don’t be discouraged. God is greater than any condition.

Some of the most beautiful encounters, Are the unexpected ones.

encountering unexpected sizes is one of the key components of human perception.

Religious experience involves an encounter with the holy, the mystery of the totally other that opens like a chasm before humans in unexpected ways, making impossible the denial of its presence.

I have by now grown accustomed, to the degree that this is humanly possible, to grasp everything that we may encounter according to its particular intensity without worrying much about how long it will last. Ultimately, this may be the best and most direct way of expecting the utmost of everything—even its duration. If we allow an encounter with a given thing to be shaped by this expectation that it may last, every such experience will be spoiled and falsified, and ultimately it will be prevented from unfolding its most proper and authentic potential and fertility. All the things that cannot be gained through our pleading can be given to us only as something unexpected, something extra: this is why I am yet again confirmed in my belief that often nothing seems to matter in life but the longest patience.

In later years, I will often write about the unthinkable, the element of unpredictability that determines outcomes. And game-changing encounters, the unexpected juxtapositions that can shift the course of a life.

In Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s great novel The Brothers Karamazov, there is a scene in which two people are talking about suffering. Ivan Karamazov is talking about there being any possibility that we can make sense of suffering, and here’s what he says: “I believe like a child that suffering will be healed and made up for, that all the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions will vanish like a pitiful mirage, like the despicable fabrication of the impotent and infinitely small Euclidean mind of man, that in the world’s finale, at the moment of eternal harmony, something so precious will come to pass that it will suffice for all hearts, for the comforting of all resentments, for the atonement of all the crimes of humanity, of all the blood that they’ve shed; that it will make it not only possible to forgive but to justify all that has happened.”11

I’d finally gotten ready, even anxious, to adopt another cat, and it’d taken long months of mourning for me to reach that point: my last companion, Suki, had, after four years of unexpected but very close cohabitation, been claimed by the cruelly short life expectancy (just four to five years) of indoor-outdoor felines, especially those in wildernesses as remote as the one we inhabited. In fact, before encountering me and deciding that I was a human she could trust, Suki had lived on her own for two years and raised at least one litter of kittens in the wild, and so had beaten the odds admirably; but her disappearance had nonetheless been a terrible blow,

My hope, for all future generations, is that they will have (in addition to sunshine, fresh air, clean water, and fertile soil) a somewhat slower pace of life, with plenty of time to pause, in quiet places . . . haunted places—everyday, accessible places, open to the public—places that are not too radically transformed over time—places susceptible of cultivation, where people can express their caring, and nature can respond—places with tough, gnarled roots and tangled stalks, with digging mammals and noisy birds—places of common remembrance and hopeful guidance—places of unexpected encounters—places that breed solidarity across difference—places where children can walk in the footsteps of those who have gone before—places that are perpetually up for adoption—places that have been humanized but not conquered or commodified—places that foster a kind of connectedness both mournful and celebratory.

• The stronger the signal you send yourself of your highest purpose, the more likely you are to notice ways to serve it • Your specificity boosts your clarity, credibility and memorability. • The specific detail proves the general conclusion, not the reverse yet we are most likely to write and speak first in generalizations. • Your focus on interconnectedness increases your frequency of serendipitous encounters, unexpected insights and deeper friendships.

Before Set’s defeat and banishment from the kingdom, he tears out one of his nephew’s eyes. But the eventually victorious Horus takes back the eye. Then he does something truly unexpected: he journeys voluntarily to the underworld and gives the eye to his father. What does this mean? First, that the encounter with malevolence and evil is of sufficient terror to damage even the vision of a god; second, that the attentive son can restore the vision of his father.

Ming is not just about the tragedies that befall us. It’s about the good things, too; the unexpected opportunities, unforeseen chances to do something we love, the chance encounter with someone who will change the trajectory of our whole life. When you hold too tightly to a plan, you risk missing out on these things. And when you wake up one day in that future, you will feel boxed in by a life that, at best, reflects only a piece of who you thought you were at one moment in time.

As long as you think there is a pretty good chance that you will achieve some of your dreams, as long as you think you have a shot at success, you experience your inner emptiness as “drive” and your anxiety as “hope.” And so you can remain almost completely oblivious to how deep your thirst actually is. Most of us tell ourselves that the reason we remain unfulfilled is because we simply haven’t been able to achieve our goals. And so we can live almost our entire lives without admitting to ourselves the depth of our spiritual thirst. And that is why the few people in life who actually do reach or exceed their dreams are shocked to discover that these longed-for circumstances do not satisfy. Indeed they can enhance the inner emptiness by their presence.

Recursion is the movement that tirelessly integrates contingency into its own functioning to realize its telos. In so doing it generates an impenetrable complexity in the course of time. Organisms exhibit a complexity of relations between parts and whole inside the body and with its environment (e.g. structural coupling) in its functioning. Life also exhibits such complexity, since it expects the unexpected, and in every encounter it attempts to turn the unexpected into an event that can contribute to its singularity.

As C. S. Lewis says in The Great Divorce, if in this life you never say to God, “Thy will be done,” then eventually God will say to you for the afterlife, “All right, then thy will be done.” If you want freedom from God, you will quite justly get what you hope for.

In later years, I will often write about the unthinkable, the element of unpredictability that determines outcomes. And game-changing encounters, the unexpected juxtapositions that can shift the course of a life. It starts there, in the winter of my seventeenth year.

Don't even listen to No body including your friends who tells you to Move On in life. They often will have destroyed your Motivation causing an unexpected anxiety, and a severe brain stress until you give up. No matter how dead serious they are in order for you to understand them, reject their Anti-statement with the Power of your Assertion. They will foolishly halter your situation you had been encountering over the past year, when it all started from the beginning. Therefore, you MUST KEEP MOVING FORWARD. DO WHAT YOU NEED TO DO THAT NEEDS TO BE DONE. Train yourself to get strong so you can outsmart and surpass the famous people who came before you. That is the way of succeeding in life in order to prove to everyone you've overcome the Obstacles and your Anxiety. Keep moving forward always surpasses moving on.

Sometimes, the most unexpected connections can become the strongest bonds. Through the serendipitous meeting on WhatsApp, our online friendship has stood the test of time, proving that distance is no match for the power of genuine connection and the beauty of chance encounters.

What about sharks?" I asked. It is one thing to encounter a shark on a reef, where there are so many other tasty nibbles to choose from, but it is another thing altogether to meet a shark in the Open Water, where you are more likely to be treated as an unexpected meal. "Yes, I saw sharks, but I couldn't catch them.

What she had unexpectedly met there in the village church was not God; it was beauty. She knew perfectly well that neither the church nor the litany was beautiful in and of itself, but they were beautiful compared to the construction site, where she spent her days amid the racket of the songs. The mass was beautiful because it appeared to her in a sudden, mysterious revelation as a world betrayed. From that time on she had known that beauty is a world betrayed. The only way we can encounter it is if its persecutors have overlooked it somewhere. Beauty hides behind the scenes of the May Day parade. If we want to find it, we must demolish the scenary.

Do not interpret anything I say here to mean “don’t fight back.” I’m also not going to patronize you with half-truths or platitudes. This is ugly on many levels: the level of the incident and the level of social conditioning to “get along,” which can make it so much harder to decide not to be a victim. This means that if and when a woman chooses to fight, it must be a total effort. In many cases, there is no level of force that will simply discourage a male attacker. He must be incapacitated. This is my advice and I think this mindset is critical, but the actual statistics are less grim—many assailants do run away and do not escalate when they encounter unexpected resistance.

But it is necessary for us to experience this too. We must accept our existence in as wide a sense as can be; everything, even the unheard-of, must be possible within it. That, when you come down to it, is the only kind of courage that is demanded of us: the courage for the oddest, the most unexpected, the most inexplicable things that we may encounter.

Chance encounters, the desire to watch, a visit from an unexpected stranger -- all of these things fall within a realm of normalcy. There is always a moment in stories like these, a fork in the road, when you wonder which path will be chosen. Will it end quietly, without incident, or will it move on to the next level? Here lies the difference between reality and imagination.

There comes an inevitable time in every life when we must cross a threshold and encounter that invisible divider between who we are and who we must become. Sometimes, the passage is evident - a sudden catastrophe that tests our mettle, a tragic loss that opens our eyes to the bane of our mortality, or a personal triumph that instills in us the confidence we need to cast aside our fears. Other times, our passage is obscured by the minutiae of an overcrowded life until we catch it in a glimpse of forbidden desire; in an inexplicable sense of melancholic emptiness or a craving for more, always more, than what we already possess. Sometimes we embrace the chance to embark on our passage, welcoming it as a chance to finally shed the adolescent skin and prove our worth against the incessant vagaries of fate. Other times, we rail against its unexpected cruelty, against the sharp thrust into a world we're not ready to explore, one we do not know or trust. For us, the past is a haven that we are loathe to depart, lest the future corrupt our soul. Better not to change at all, rather than become someone we will not recognize.

OPEN YOURSELF TO SERENDIPITY Chance encounters can also provide enormous benefits for your projects—and your life. Being friendly while standing in line for coffee at a conference might lead to a conversation, a business card exchange, and the first investment in your company a few months later. The person sitting next to you at a concert who chats you up during intermission might end up becoming your largest customer. Or, two strangers sitting in a nail salon exchanging stories about their families might lead to a blind date, which might lead to a marriage. (This is how I met my wife. Lucky for me, neither stranger had a smartphone, so they resorted to matchmaking.) I am consistently humbled and amazed by just how much creation and realization is the product of serendipity. Of course, these chance opportunities must be noticed and pursued for them to have any value. It makes you wonder how much we regularly miss. As we tune in to our devices during every moment of transition, we are letting the incredible potential of serendipity pass us by. The greatest value of any experience is often found in its seams. The primary benefits of a conference often have nothing to do with what happens onstage. The true reward of a trip to the nail salon may be more than the manicure. When you value the power of serendipity, you start noticing it at work right away. Try leaving the smartphone in your pocket the next time you’re in line or in a crowd. Notice one source of unexpected value on every such occasion. Develop the discipline to allow for serendipity.

In all his spiciness, it was the chili pepper who posed the zesty question to me—how would you learn of what is presently unknown about our vegetal ways of communicating if you are not looking for it and do not even realize that it may exist? Generously, he had also provided the answer—exclude the known to allow yourself to see what unexpected things might happen. And the unexpected is exactly what happened.

I’m aware that I’m holding my torso tensely, one of the telltale signs of the high-reactive. It feels strange to know that Kagan must be observing this too—he says as much, nodding at me as he notes that many high-reactives become writers or pick other intellectual vocations where “you’re in charge: you close the door, pull down the shades and do your work. You’re protected from encountering unexpected things.

The earliest storytellers were magi, seers, bards, griots, shamans. They were, it would seem, as old as time, and as terrifying to gaze upon as the mysteries with which they wrestled. They wrestled with mysteries and transformed them into myths which coded the world and helped the community to live through one more darkness, with eyes wide open and hearts set alight. "I can see them now, the old masters. I can see them standing on the other side of the flames, speaking in the voices of lions, or thunder, or monsters, or heroes, heroines, or the earth, or fire itself -- for they had to contain all voices within them, had to be all things and nothing. They had to have the ability to become lightning, to become a future homeland, to be the dreaded guide to the fabled land where the community will settle and fructify. They had to be able to fight in advance all the demons they would encounter, and summon up all the courage needed on the way, to prophesy about all the requisite qualities that would ensure their arrival at the dreamt-of land. "The old masters had to be able to tell stories that would make sleep possible on those inhuman nights, stories that would counter terror with enchantment, or with a greater terror. I can see them, beyond the flames, telling of a hero's battle with a fabulous beast -- the beast that is in the hero." "The storyteller's art changed through the ages. From battling dread in word and incantations before their people did in reality, they became the repositories of the people's wisdom and follies. Often, conscripted by kings, they became the memory of a people's origins, and carried with them the long line of ancestries and lineages. Most important of all, they were the living libraries, the keepers of legends and lore. They knew the causes and mutations of things, the herbs, trees, plants, cures for diseases, causes for wars, causes of victory, the ways in which victory often precipitates defeat, or defeat victory, the lineages of gods, the rites humans have to perform to the gods. They knew of follies and restitutions, were advocates of new and old ways of being, were custodians of culture, recorders of change." "These old storytellers were the true magicians. They were humanity's truest friends and most reliable guides. Their role was both simple and demanding. They had to go down deep into the seeds of time, into the dreams of their people, into the unconscious, into the uncharted fears, and bring shapes and moods back up into the light. They had to battle with monsters before they told us about them. They had to see clearly." "They risked their sanity and their consciousness in the service of dreaming better futures. They risked madness, or being unmoored in the wild realms of the interspaces, or being devoured by the unexpected demons of the communal imagination." "And I think that now, in our age, in the mid-ocean of our days, with certainties collapsing around us, and with no beliefs by which to steer our way through the dark descending nights ahead -- I think that now we need those fictional old bards and fearless storytellers, those seers. We need their magic, their courage, their love, and their fire more than ever before. It is precisely in a fractured, broken age that we need mystery and a reawoken sense of wonder. We need them to be whole again.

When seasoned by the subtleties of accident, harmony, favor, wisdom, and inevitability, luck takes on the cast of serendipity. Serendipity happens when a well-trained mind looking for one thing encounters something else: the unexpected. It comes from being in a position to seize opportunity from the happy marriage of time, place, and chance. It was serendipity that called her in the countdown to John Glenn’s flight.

What did you do?' the ancestor asked, all agog, and the McCorkadale gave that sniffing snort of hers. It was partly like an escape of steam and partly like two or three cats unexpectedly encountering two or three dogs, with just a suggestion of a cobra waking up cross in the morning. I wondered how it had affected the late Mr McCorkadale. Probably made him feel that there are worse things than being run over by a municipal tram.

Instead of striving for a life that could somehow match the clean beauty of an image from Instagram or the blurry glory of a trailer for an orgiastically great concert that could never happen, imagine striving for a way to encounter the small details of everyday life as if they were unexpectedly delightful. Isn’t that how luxury is supposed to feel, after all? Luxury means being able to relax and savor the moment, knowing that it doesn’t get any better than this. Feeling that way doesn’t require money. It doesn’t require the perfect scenery. All that’s required is an ability to survey a landscape that is disheveled, that is off-kilter, that is slightly unattractive or unsettling, and say to yourself: This is exactly how it should be. This requires a big shift in perspective: Since your thoughts and feelings can’t simply be turned off, you have to train your thoughts and feelings to experience imperfections as acceptable or preferable—even divine.

I am not sure who started this chicken-and-egg problem, but as we consumers encounter offensive service, we become angrier and tend to take it out on the next service provider—whether or not he or she is responsible for our bad experience. The people receiving our emotional outbursts then go on to serve other customers, but because they are in a worse mood themselves, they aren’t in a position to be courteous and polite. And so goes the carousel of annoyance, frustration, and revenge in an ever-escalating cycle.

He is the Lion and the Lamb. Despite his high claims, he is never pompous; you never see him standing on his own dignity. Despite being absolutely approachable to the weakest and broken, he is completely fearless before the corrupt and powerful. He has tenderness without weakness. Strength without harshness. Humility without the slightest lack of confidence. Unhesitating authority with a complete lack of self-absorption. Holiness and unending convictions without any shortage of approachability. Power without insensitivity.

A person’s perception on the existence of free will affects how they perceive reality. Rather than exercising any resistance against the inevitability of the future, philosophical pessimists resign themselves to accept whatever will happen. I do believe in limited free will, in part, because I am unwilling to accept that the choices we make and our hard work to accomplish personal goals is a silly frivolity. The universe is conceivably an unstable entity subject to random events and chance encounters producing unexpected and unanticipated events.

Fate has a funny way of presenting love, sometimes delivering it in the most unexpected and seemingly contradictory of packages. When we spend years searching for our soulmate, hoping and praying for that perfect match, fate often surprises us by placing our destined love right in front of us, disguised as an adversary. The love of our life may not always arrive in the form we envision, wrapped in a neat, predictable package. Sometimes, our soulmate is the very person we're running from, the one we've labeled as our enemy. It's in these unexpected encounters that fate reveals its true humor, reminding us that love can blossom in the most unlikely of circumstances. If we allow ourselves to listen to the whispers of our heart, if we pay attention to the subtle signs that fate sends our way, we might just discover that the love we've been searching for has been there all along, hiding in plain sight. Social media and the abundance of love advice can often misguide us, creating unrealistic expectations and narrowing our perspectives. But true love doesn't conform to a formula; it's a unique and individual journey that unfolds in its own time and in its own way. Don't let the noise of the world drown out the voice of your heart. Embrace the unexpected, for it is often in the most surprising encounters that we discover the love of our lives.

Beauty, mystery, wonder. They all three go together. The primary human response to an encounter with overwhelming beauty is wonder. Wonder is the transcendent sensation we experience when we find ourselves in the presence of an awe-inspiring sunset, artistic masterpiece, or newborn baby. Wonder is the uniquely human reaction to the sublime. Wonder is a large part of what it means to be human. Wonder defined is, "a feeling of surprise mingled with admiration caused by something beautiful, unexpected, or inexplicable." We wonder at two things - the beautiful and the mysterious. A life stripped of beauty and mystery is a life barren of wonder, and a life without wonder is a kind of deep poverty.

The slim chestnut-haired woman had been battering an assailant twice her size with precisely aimed strikes of her cane. Ethan had loved the way she'd done it, as if attending to some necessary task, like carrying a household bin out to the rubbish carter. Her face had been unexpectedly young, her complexion clean-scrubbed and as smooth as a tablet of white soap. All cheekbones and cool green eyes, with a sharp little rampart of a chin. But amidst the elegant angles and edges of her features, there was a valentine of a mouth, tender and vulnerable, the upper lip nearly as full as the lower. A mouth with such pretty curves that it did something to Ethan's knees every time he saw it. After that first encounter, Ethan had taken care to avoid Garrett Gibson, knowing she would be trouble for him, possibly even worse than he would be for her. But last month he'd gone to visit her at the medical clinic where she worked, for information concerning one of her patients, and his fascination had ignited all over again. Everything about Garrett Gibson was... delicious. The dissecting gaze, the voice as crisp as the icing on a lemon cake. The compassion that drove her to treat the undeserving poor as well as the deserving. The purposeful walk, the relentless energy, the self-satisfaction of a woman who neither concealed nor apologized for her own intelligence. She was sunlight and steel, spun into a substance he'd never encountered before. The mere thought of her left him like a stray coal on the hearth.

Each thought or emotion holds its own unique form of creative energy, and thoughts having a similar frequency band together to form a homogeneous creative field around the person who emitted them. When the amassed energy of a particular creative field has accumulated to a critical point, and is triggered by some external circumstance, it manifests itself in some way on the visible plane. This manifestation might occur in the form of some sort of event, happening, or situation that emerges in the person’s life. It might take shape in the form of an encounter with another person. Or, it might manifest itself in words that are heard or read, or observed popping up unexpectedly in the person’s own mind. Once this manifestation has occurred, the energy held within the creative field is depleted to just that extent.

Mastery isn't about being the best tennis player or the best mom. The resonance of mastery is in the process and progress. It is about work, and learning to develop an appetite for challenge. Mastery inevitably means encountering hurdles; you won't always overcome them, but you won't let them stop you from trying. You may never become a world-class swimmer, but you will learn to swim across the lake. And the unexpected by-product of all of that hard work you put in to mastering things? Confidence. Not only did you learn to do something well, but you got a freebie. The next point is invaluable. The confidence you get from mastery is contagious. It spreads. It doesn't even really matter what you master: For a child, it can be as simple as tying a shoe. What matters is that mastering one thing gives you the confidence to try something else.

Everywhere, in whatever realm of life, whether among its callous, coarsely impoverished and messily moldering lower ranks, or among its monotonously gelid and tediously tidy upper strata, everywhere, if but once, a person will encounter a phenomenon on his journey that is unlike anything he has chanced to see heretofore and that, at least once will awake in him a feeling unlike any he is fated to feel for the rest of his life. Everywhere, across the sorrows, whatever they be, from which this life of ours is woven, a resplendent joy will gaily flash, just as sometimes a glittering equipage with golden trappings, picturesque steeds, and the gleam and sparkle of windows will suddenly and unexpectedly rush past some wretched little back-country village that has never seen anything but a rural cart, and long afterwards the muzhiks will stand, mouths agape, caps in hand, although the wondrous equipage has long since whirled off and disappeared from view. Such is the manner in which the pretty little blonde, suddenly and quite unexpectedly, has appeared in our story and has vanished in the same manner. If on this occasion some twenty-year-old youth had happened to be there instead of Chichikov, whether a hussar, or a student, or merely someone who had just embarked on the course of his life, then Lord! what would not have awakened, not have begun to stir, not have begun to speak within him! Long would he have remained standing, insensible, in one spot, eyes fixed vacantly upon the distance, oblivious to the road and to all the reprimands awaiting him and to the chastisements for tardiness, oblivious to himself, and his work, and the world, and everything that exists in the world.

I'm near tears at this moment. But I also get an unexpected burst of courage, and here's what it feels like: I don't care anymore if this guy hates me or badmouths me to other club owners. Because now - and I've never felt this before - I actively want him to hate me. It becomes imperative, for my self-worth, that and asshole like Reed actively loathe me. If someone like this were to like me, to like my comedy, and to like the way I conduct myself professionally, it would mean I suck as a person. I've encountered this a few times since then. Not very often. But there are those rare occasions - and they're bracing, freeing sensations when they occur - when you absolutely crave someone's disapproval and disgust. You can see it actually helping your career, your social relations, and your life if it becomes known that this person thinks you're shit.

Here is New York. This is why I stay. I stay to hear the jazz musicians playing in the parks, and to browse the tables of books for sale on the street. I stay for a drink in a quiet bar, lit by golden autumn light, and for Film Forum double features in black and white. I stay for egg creams, for the amateur opera singers practicing with their windows open so we all can listen. For the Chinese grandmothers dancing by the East River, snapping red fans in their hands. For the music of shopkeepers throwing open their gates. I stay for the unexpected spectacle, and the chance encounter, and for those tough seagulls gliding inland on rainy days to remind us that Manhattan is an island, a potential space both separate and connected. Most of all, I stay because I need New York. I can't live anywhere else, so I hold on to what remains. We've lost a lot, but there's so much left worth fighting for. And while I stay, I fight.

At the beginning of history there was also a garden and a command. God put Adam and Eve in that garden, and they were told not to eat of the Tree. The direction was: “Obey me about the Tree, and you will live”—obey me and I’ll bless you. But they disobeyed. Now there is another garden, and a Second Adam, and another command. Jesus Christ has been sent by the Father to go to the cross, which is also a tree. To the first Adam he said, “Obey me about the Tree and I will bless you”—and Adam didn’t do it. But to the second Adam he says, “Obey me about the Tree and I will crush you”—and Jesus does. Jesus is the first and last person in history to be told that obedience would bring a curse. The Father is saying, essentially, “If you obey me, if you are faithful to me, I will forsake you, cast you off and send your soul into hell.” And yet Jesus obeyed. Even as he was dying, abandoned by his Father, he called him “My God”—words that in the Bible were covenant language, conveying intimacy. Even though he was being forsaken, Jesus was still obeying.

The challenge, I thought and think, is to learn to use with freedom the cage we’re shut up in. It’s a painful contradiction: how can one use a cage with freedom, whether it’s a solid literary genre or established expressive habits or even the language itself, dialect? A possible answer seemed to me Stein’s: adapting and at the same time deforming. Maintain distance: yes, but only to then get as close as possible. Avoid the pure outburst? Yes, but then burst out. Aim at consistency? Yes, but then be inconsistent. Make a polished, highly polished, draft, until the words no longer encounter friction with the meanings? Yes, but then leave it rough. Overload the genres with conventional expectations? Yes, but in order to disappoint them. That is, inhabit the forms and then deform everything that doesn’t contain us entirely, that can’t in any way contain us. It seemed to me effective for the ornate lies of the great literary catalogue to show lumps and cracks, to bang against one another. I hoped that an unexpected truth would emerge, surprising me above all.

At eight-thirty that night Ian stood on the steps outside Elizabeth’s uncle’s town house suppressing an almost overwhelming desire to murder Elizabeth’s butler, who seemed to be inexplicably fighting down the impulse to do bodily injury to Ian. “I will ask you again, in case you misunderstood me the last time,” Ian enunciated in a silky, ominous tone that made ordinary men blanch. “Where is your mistress?” Bentner didn’t change color by so much as a shade. “Out!” he informed the man who’d ruined his young mistress’s life and had now appeared on her doorstep, unexpected and uninvited, no doubt to try to ruin it again, when she was at this very moment attending her first ball in years and trying bravely to live down the gossip he had caused. “She is out, but you do not know where she is?” “I did not say so, did I?” “Then where is she?” “That is for me to know and you to ponder.” In the last several days Ian had been forced to do a great many unpleasant things, including riding across half of England, dealing with Christina’s irate father, and finally dealing with Elizabeth’s repugnant uncle, who had driven a bargain that still infuriated him. Ian had magnanimously declined her dowry as soon as the discussion began. Her uncle, however, had the finely honed bargaining instincts of a camel trader, and he immediately sensed Ian’s determination to do whatever was necessary to get Julius’s name on a betrothal contract. As a result, Ian was the first man to his knowledge who had ever been put in the position of purchasing his future wife for a ransom of $150,000. Once he’d finished that repugnant ordeal he’d ridden off to Montmayne, where he’d sopped only long enough to switch his horse for a coach and get his valet out of bed. Then he’d charged off to London, stopped at his town house to bathe and change, and gone straight to the address Julius Cameron had given him. Now, after all that, Ian was not only confronted by Elizabeth’s absence, he was confronted by the most insolent servant he’d ever had the misfortune to encounter. In angry silence he turned and walked down the steps. Behind him the door slammed shut with a thundering crash, and Ian paused a moment to turn back and contemplate the pleasure he was going to have when he sacked the butler tomorrow.

There is a scene I love where a brother and sister meet after many years and little communication. They meet in an arranged café in mid-afternoon. The light is dying and the city outside rumbles softly in the complacent time before rush hour. The café is unexceptional and quiet. She comes first, sits at the far end, a table facing the door, nervous in her buttoned raincoat. The waiter is an older man. He leaves her be. The brother enters late with the look but not the words of apology. He kisses her cheek. They sit and the old man brings them teas they do not want, two pots, strong for him weak for her. It is long ago since they said each other’s names aloud, and saying them now has the extraordinary shyness of encounter I imagine on the Last Day. At first there is the full array of human awkwardness. But here is the thing: almost in an instant their old selves are immediately present. The years and the changes are nothing. They need few words. They recognise each other in each other, and even in silence the familiarity is powerfully consoling, because despite time and difference there remains that deep-river current, that kind of maybe communion that only exists within people joined in the word family. So now what washes up between them, foam-white and fortifying and quite unexpectedly, is love. I cannot remember what book it is in. But it’s in this one now.

The only way to avoid encountering someone is to follow him (according to a principle opposed to the principle of the labyrinth, where you follow someone so that you do not lose him). Implicit in the situation, however, is the dramatic moment when the one being followed, suddenly intuiting, suddenly becoming conscious that there is someone behind him, swings round and spots his pursuer. Then the rules are reversed, and the hunter becomes the hunted (for there is no escaping laterally). The only truly dramatic point is this unexpected turning-round of the other, who insists upon knowing and damns the consequences. This reversal does in fact occur in the Venice scenario. The man comes towards her and asks her: 'What do you want?' She wants nothing. No mystery story, no love story. This answer is intolerable, and implies possible murder, possible death. Radical otherness always embodies the risk of death. S.'s anxiety revolves entirely around this violent revelation: the possibility of getting herself unmasked - the very thing she is trying to avoid. 'I cannot go on following him. He must be uneasy, he must be wondering if I am here, behind him - surely he is thinking about me now - so I shall have to keep track of him in some other way.' S. could have met this man, seen him, spoken to him. But in that case she would never have produced this secret form of the existence of the Other. The Other is the one whose destiny one becomes, not by making his acquaintance in difference and dialogue but by entering into him as into something secret, something forever separate. Not by engaging in a conversation with him as interlocutor, but by entering into him as his shadow, as his double, as his image, by embracing the Other the better to wipe out his tracks, the better to strip him of his shadow. The Other is never the one with whom we communicate: he is the one whom we follow - and who follows us. The other is never naturally the other: the other must be rendered other by being seduced, by being made alien to himself, even by being destroyed - if there is no alternative (but in fact there are subtler ways of achieving this end).

A phobia is an excessive or unreasonable fear of an object, situation or place. Phobias are quite common and often take root in childhood for no apparent reason. Other times they spring from traumatic events or develop from an attempt to make sense of unexpected and intense feelings of anxiety or panic. Simple phobias are fears of specific things such as insects, infections, or even flying. Agoraphobia is a fear of being in places where one feels trapped or unable to get help, such as in crowds, on a bus or in a car, or standing in a line. It is basically an anxiety that ignites from being in places or situations from which escape might be difficult (or embarrassing). A social phobia is a marked fear of social or performance situations. When the phobic person actually encounters, or even anticipates, being in the presence of the feared object or situation, immediate anxiety can be triggered. The physical symptoms of anxiety may include shortness of breath, sweating, a racing heart, chest or abdominal discomfort, trembling, and similar reactions. The emotional component involves an intense fear and may include feelings of losing control, embarrassing oneself, or passing out. Most people who experience phobias try to escape or avoid the feared situation wherever possible. This may be fairly easy if the feared object is rarely encountered (such as snakes) and avoidance will not greatly restrict the person’s life. At other times, avoiding the feared situation (in the case of agoraphobia, social phobia) is not easily done. After all, we live in a world filled with people and places. Having a fear of such things can limit anyone’s life significantly, and trying to escape or avoid a feared object or situation because of feelings of fear about that object or situation can escalate and make the feelings of dread and terror even more pronounced. In some situations of phobias, the person may have specific thoughts that contribute some threat to the feared situation. This is particularly true for social phobia, in which there is often a fear of being negatively evaluated by others, and for agoraphobia, in which there may be a fear of passing out or dying with no one around to help, and of having a panic attack where one fears making a fool of oneself in the presence of other people. Upon recognizing their problem for what it is, men should take heart in knowing that eighty percent of people who seek help can experience improvement of symptoms or, in male-speak, the illness can be “fixed.

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Or think of the tale of the blind men who encounter an elephant for the first time. One wise man, touching the ear of the elephant, declares the elephant is flat and two-dimensional like a fan. Another wise man touches the tail and assumes the elephant is like rope or a one-dimensional string. Another, touching a leg, concludes the elephant is a three-dimensional drum or a cylinder. But actually, if we step back and rise into the third dimension, we can see the elephant as a three-dimensional animal. In the same way, the five different string theories are like the ear, tail, and leg, but we still have yet to reveal the full elephant, M-theory. Holographic Universe As we mentioned, with time new layers have been uncovered in string theory. Soon after M-theory was proposed in 1995, another astonishing discovery was made by Juan Maldacena in 1997. He jolted the entire physics community by showing something that was once considered impossible: that a supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory, which describes the behavior of subatomic particles in four dimensions, was dual, or mathematically equivalent, to a certain string theory in ten dimensions. This sent the physics world into a tizzy. By 2015, there were ten thousand papers that referred to this paper, making it by far the most influential paper in high-energy physics. (Symmetry and duality are related but different. Symmetry arises when we rearrange the components of a single equation and it remains the same. Duality arises when we show that two entirely different theories are actually mathematically equivalent. Remarkably, string theory has both of these highly nontrivial features.) As we saw, Maxwell’s equations have a duality between electric and magnetic fields—that is, the equations remain the same if we reverse the two fields, turning electric fields into magnetic fields. (We can see this mathematically, because the EM equations often contain terms like E2 + B2, which remain the same when we rotate the two fields into each other, like in the Pythagorean theorem). Similarly, there are five distinct string theories in ten dimensions, which can be proven to be dual to each other, so they are really a single eleven-dimensional M-theory in disguise. So remarkably, duality shows that two different theories are actually two aspects of the same theory. Maldacena, however, showed that there was yet another duality between strings in ten dimensions and Yang-Mills theory in four dimensions. This was a totally unexpected development but one that has profound implications. It meant that there were deep, unexpected connections between the gravitational force and the nuclear force defined in totally different dimensions. Usually, dualities can be found between strings in the same dimension. By rearranging the terms describing those strings, for example, we can often change one string theory into another. This creates a web of dualities between different string theories, all defined in the same dimension. But a duality between two objects defined in different dimensions was unheard of.

The translucent, golden punch tastes velvety, voluptuous and not off-puttingly milky. Under its influence, I stage a party for my heroines in my imagination, and in my flat. It's less like the glowering encounter I imagined between Cathy Earnshaw and Flora Poste, and more like the riotous bash in Breakfast at Tiffany's. Not everyone is going to like milk punch. So there are also dirty martinis, and bagels and baklava, and my mother's masafan, Iraqi marzipan. The Little Mermaid is in the bath, with her tail still on, singing because she never did give up her soaring voice. Anne Shirley and Jo March are having a furious argument about plot versus character, gesticulating with ink-stained hands. Scarlett is in the living room, her skirts taking up half the space, trying to show Lizzy how to bat her eyelashes. Lizzy is laughing her head off ut Scarlett has acquired a sense of humour, and doesn't mind a bit. Melanie is talking book with Esther Greenwood, who has brought her baby and also the proofs of her first poetry collection. Franny and Zooey have rolled back the rug and are doing a soft shoe shuffle in rhinestone hats. Lucy Honeychurch is hammering out some Beethoven (in this scenario I have a piano. A ground piano. Well, why not?) Marjorie Morningstar is gossiping about directors with Pauline and Posy Fossil. They've come straight from the shows they're in, till in stage make-up and full of stories. Petrova, in a leather aviator jacket, goggles pushed back, a chic scarf knotted around her neck, is telling the thrilling story of her latest flight and how she fixed an engine fault in mid-air. Mira, in her paint-stained jeans and poncho, is listening, fascinated, asking a thousand questions. Mildred has been persuaded to drink a tiny glass of sherry, then another tiny glass, then another and now she and Lolly are doing a wild, strange dance in the hallway, stamping their feet, their hair flying wild and electric. Lolly's cakes, in the shape of patriarchs she hates, are going down a treat. The Dolls from the Valley are telling Flora some truly scandalous and unrepeatable stories, and she is firmly advising them to get rid of their men and find worthier paramours. Celie is modelling trousers of her own design and taking orders from the Lace women; Judy is giving her a ten-point plan on how to expand her business to an international market. She is quite drunk but nevertheless the plan seems quite coherent, even if it is punctuated by her bellowing 'More leopard print, more leopard print!' Cathy looks tumultuous and on the edge of violent weeping and just as I think she's going to storm out or trash my flat, Jane arrives, late, with an unexpected guest. Cathy turns in anticipation: is it Heathcliff? Once I would have joined her but now I'm glad it isn't him. It's a better surprise. It's Emily's hawk. Hero or Nero. Jane's found him at last, and has him on her arm, perched on her glove; small for a bird of prey, he is dashing and patrician looking, brown and white, observing the room with dark, flinty eyes. When Cathy sees him, she looks at Jane and smiles. And in the kitchen is a heroine I probably should have had when I was four and sitting on my parents' carpet, wishing it would fly. In the kitchen is Scheherazade.

All the sounds, words, emotions and memories of previous experiences cannot prepare us enough for the encounters with the unexpected, challenging our values, preconceptions and beliefs. It is then that one is either rewarded for his faith or punished for the lack of it. The ultimate test, however, emerges in the form of what one desires the most hidden beneath the layer of what is simultaneously feared. No one knows the outcome of this invisible battle until its very end. It is when the heart is finally offered to that confrontation that one faces the last gate of his own mortal life, and in doing so, is led to either an immediate rebirth or a slow death.

Penman and Williams taught me that it’s all about learning that negative thoughts ‘are like propaganda, they are not real. They are not you. You can learn to observe negative thoughts as they arise, let them stay a while and then simply watch them evaporate.’ A fretful ten minutes of worrying doesn’t necessarily have to colour the rest of the day blue. An encounter with a rude stranger doesn’t have to disrupt my mood.

That is the gospel—the good news that we are saved by the work of Christ through grace.

She had hardly slept the night before and even yet was not quite able to think coherently enough to sort out what exactly had happened or how she felt about it. Too much had happened, too many strange and unexpected things.

Pleasure is a matter of encountering. It is a possibility of feeling that finds completion in an encounter with a body, element or substance. That is all there is to pleasure: agreeable sensations, sweet, unprecedented, deliciously unexpected, wild... It is always some sensation, and always triggered by an encounter, by something that confirms, from outside, the possibilities inscribed in our bodies. Pleasure is the encounter with the good object: the one that causes a possibility of feeling to blossom.

How quickly the shell of a routine is shattered. Any routine, however solid it may be, is obliterated by the unexpected.

About Mindset (心持やうの事) The mindset required [of the warrior] is to relentlessly deliberate on strategy, whether you are active or sitting down, with others or on your own. You must constantly reflect on this Way. Anticipate how to never lose to others, and with an expansive and straight heart act according to the circumstances within the model of the Way of combat strategy. Work out the mind of others and make sure that they cannot read yours. Do not rely on one thing but be aware of strengths and weaknesses, depths and shallows, leaving nothing to the unexpected. In normal times, and when you meet with the enemy, this mindset is to be maintained, with care taken not to jump to conclusions. Be aware of all things, knowing what is good and bad. This is the mindset for combat strategy. (2) About Gaze (目付の事) With regards to where one focuses the eyes, there is only the dual gaze of “looking in” (kan) and “looking at” (ken). Look carefully at the enemy’s face to figure out his heart and intent. When scrutinizing the enemy’s face, whether he be near or far, do not think of it as close. Absorb it all as if observing from a distance. Keep your eyes narrower than usual and do not move your eyeballs as you scrutinize him intently and calmly. That way you can see all the movements of his hands and feet and even [what is happening at] his left and right sides. The gaze for “looking at” is gentle whereas that for “looking in” is strong enough to peer into the interior of his heart. You will come to know him well as his heart is reflected in his countenance, which is why you should fix your gaze on the face of each enemy. (3) About Posture (身なりの事) You should hold your body in a way that makes you appear big. Your expression should be genial and free of wrinkles. The back of your neck should be slightly toughened, with your shoulders neither strained nor slouching forward. Do not jut out your chest. Project your stomach but do not bend your hips. Your legs should not buckle at the knees, and there should be no distortion in your body. Always strive to preserve this combat posture so that you do not need to change your stance when you encounter the enemy.

We are watching as human beings are being encountered by God in unexpected ways, and we are waiting to discover how we might be able to join that drama by saying yes to God.

The Five Whys ties the rate of progress to learning, not just execution. Startup teams should go through the Five Whys whenever they encounter any kind of failure, including technical faults, failures to achieve business results, or unexpected changes in customer behavior. Five Whys is a powerful organizational technique. Some of the engineers I have trained to use it believe that you can derive all the other Lean Startup techniques from the Five Whys. Coupled with working in small batches, it provides the foundation a company needs to respond quickly to problems as they appear, without overinvesting or overengineering.

An uplifting story of a middle-aged woman overcoming fear and self-doubts to find adventure, love, and family. Forced into early retirement, Bennett Hall plans for a quiet, orderly, and anonymous existence. No longer will she be burdened by her dependent but unlovable aunt, or her own misperceived rejections. Unexpected encounters and a new job crack open her social isolation. The arrival of Joe Muir, an attractive widower, and his two adopted Ugandan children, awaken Bennett’s long-ignored desires--and self-doubts. Inspired to win Joe’s love she flies to Uganda in search of the children’s missing sister. To overcome the dangers and challenges she confronts, she must find the courage she has always lacked.

Plain Jane and the Mermaid" is a captivating blend of fantasy and romance, where an ordinary woman discovers her extraordinary strength and courage through an unexpected encounter with a mermaid. Sarah Smith's enchanting narrative beautifully explores themes of self-discovery and acceptance, delivering a heartfelt tale that will leave readers spellbound.

Does the anonymous, secular individual have to be content with the concealment of the invisible, which has now become the precondition of communal life? This is a watershed. If the essential factor is not belief, but knowledge — as every gnosis presupposes — it will be a matter of opening a way into obscurity, using any means, in a sort of continual bricolage of knowledge, without any certainty about where to start, any concern about the ultimate destination. This is the condition, both wretched and exalting, faced today by those who belong to no religious denomination, but who, at the same time, refuse to accept the religion, or, more precisely, the superstition of society. It is a difficult path, which has no name, no points of reference apart from those that are coded and strictly personal, but it is also a path along which one encounters the unexpected assistance of kindred voices, as in a clandestine constellation. I don't believe we can expect any more in the fraction of time in which we live. And yet, if we look closely, that is an enormous amount. And it is a great game, which not so few have practiced over the centuries, without declaring it, and which now should have the audacity to show itself in full light.

What reined in my instincts then was the desire to hide: to keep the sanctity of 'my' space intact, to avoid unexpected encounters with anyone from my 'real' life. We all have our own corners of the earth we run to.

There is a scene I love where a brother and sister meet after many years and little communication. They meet in an arranged café in mid-afternoon. The light is dying and the city outside rumbles softly in the complacent time before rush hour. The café is unexceptional and quiet. She comes first, sits at the far end, a table facing the door, nervous in her buttoned raincoat. The waiter is an older man. He leaves her be. The brother enters late with the look but not the words of apology. He kisses her cheek. They sit and the old man brings them teas they do not want, two pots, strong for him weak for her. It is long ago since they said each other’s names aloud, and saying them now has the extraordinary shyness of encounter I imagine on the Last Day. At first there is the full array of human awkwardness. But here is the thing: almost in an instant their old selves are immediately present. The years and the changes are nothing. They need few words. They recognise each other in each other, and even in silence the familiarity is powerfully consoling, because despite time and difference there remains that deep-river current, that kind of maybe communion that only exists within people joined in the word family. So now what washes up between them, foam-white and fortifying and quite unexpectedly, is love. I cannot remember what book it is in. But it’s in this one now.

Then the rabbis did what most of us do after encountering unexpected, unsettling conflict. They tried to move on. They hoped the turmoil would die down and everything would go back to normal.

Oh, really,” I said, pushing myself to my feet. “I thought it was because you couldn’t get rid of me.” “Well, that, too,” she said with an impish grin. She groaned as she scrambled to her feet. “One thing’s clear at least. I’m going to have to go a little easier on all those refreshments at the balls and afternoon teas and soirees. I think they’re starting to take their toll.” “Very true,” I said, my face serious. “I’d been meaning to say something…” She shot me a worried look, and I couldn’t help grinning. “But I figured you’d notice yourself seeing as how you’ve started having to turn sideways to fit through doors.” She took a swipe at me, but I stepped deftly out of her way. “See?” I said, still smiling. “You’re getting slow, too.” She rolled her eyes, and I ducked in close enough to whisper in her ear. “You wouldn’t want to risk looking less than perfect for Miles now, would you?” She exclaimed in outrage and tried once again to catch me. I escaped her easily, and she proceeded to chase me around the fountains, much to the amusement of the children who followed behind us, shrieking encouragement to one or the other of us. I eluded her for several minutes, ducking behind fountains and jumping over benches, purely for the entertainment of our audience. She entered into the drama with equal enthusiasm, pretending to be slower than she really was. When I eventually let her catch me, we both collapsed onto a bench, laughing. “Don’t think I didn’t notice the blush,” I whispered, too quietly for the children to hear. “I hope you’re not forgetting who Miles is.” I shot her a warning look, and she met my eyes, her own full of guilt. But Ava approached us before she could reply. “If you two are quite finished, we should probably get back to the castle now.” I jumped to my feet, but she was smiling so I relaxed. “As you command, Your Majesty,” I said, bowing low. The children laughed again, and Ava shook her head at me. We were all still smiling when we left the square. None of us were really in a hurry to get back, so we walked, leading the horses behind us. Ava and Sarah were talking idly about the court when a voice called to Ava from across the street. I turned around and sucked in a sharp breath. It was Anhalt, one arm raised in greeting and a broad smile on his face. I had just enough time to whisper his name to Ava and Sarah before he had crossed over to join us. I was careful to keep my face free of all emotion as Sarah and I dropped back to walk respectfully behind Ava and the count. Anhalt seemed delighted with our chance encounter and determined to make the most of his unexpected audience with the queen. I watched the surrounding streets with my usual vigilance while I wondered if his voice really sounded so oily, or if it was my own feelings painting my perception of them. Sarah was listening intently to their conversation, her eyes never leaving the count’s form. I knew she would be paying attention for any clues, so I stopped listening myself, devoting my full attention to watching for any threat to the queen. I wasn’t sure if it was this extra attentiveness or just a heightened sense of alert due to the count’s presence, but I noticed an odd flicker of movement as we passed a small side alley. It was barely more than a shifting of shadow, and I could easily have missed it. Instead I tensed, my hand flying to my sword hilt. In one step, I placed myself between Ava and the alley. She turned to look at me, surprised out of her conversation by my sudden movement. I spoke to her but kept my eyes trained on the shadows. “It might be nothing, but I think it would be a good idea if we moved a bit faster, Your Majesty.

In experiments, people who expect acceptance and encounter rejection instead tend to react with more hostility. That’s because threats that are unexpected and unpredictable feel more dangerous to us.

Faith doesn't mean hoping in what isn't true; it means certainty about what you can't see. And so compelling evidence, evidence that engages rationality is one of the greatest boosts to Christianity

But what if our interruptions are in fact our opportunities, if they are challenges to an inner response by which growth takes place and through which we come to the fullness of being? What if the events of our history are molding us as a sculptor molds his clay, and if it is only in a careful obedience to these molding hands that we can discover our real vocation and become mature people? What if all the unexpected interruptions are in fact the invitations to give up old-fashioned and outmoded styles of living and are opening up new unexplored areas of experience? And finally: What if our history does not prove to be a blind impersonal sequence of events over which we have no control, but rather reveals to us a guiding hand pointing to a personal encounter in which all our hopes and aspirations will reach their fulfillment? Then our life would indeed be a different life because then fate becomes opportunity, wounds a warning and paralysis an invitation to search for deeper sources of vitality. Then we can look for hope in the middle of crying cities, burning hospitals and desperate parents and children. Then we can cast off the temptation of despair and speak about the fertile tree while witnessing the dying of the seed. Then indeed we can break out of the prison of an anonymous series of events and listen to the God of history who speaks to us in the center of our solitude and respond to his ever new call for conversion.

Most things in the world are not unexpected if one thinks carefully about them. Even something one would call unusual- If one thinks about it, it's really just a thing that was supposed to happen. Encountering unusual events often means you didn't think things through.

Breezy Days Deserve The Union Of Two Close Friends. Somewhere I'm Thinking About You At The Same Time, You Are Thinking About Me. There Is A Voice Which Speaks Clearly Through The Winds Of Time. Like An Unexpected Jolt Awakening To Its Encounter. When We Allow Our Most Vulnerable And Powerful Selves To Be Deeply Seen Known And Touched By Someone. It Brings Fire And Aliveness. We Yearn To Be Seen In This Captivating Experience. I Want You Because There’s No One Else Like You, Lets Continually Take Care Of Our Fingerprints With An Enduring Effort. Lets Seek The Because - In Love. I Will Admit Your Smile Has Lit My World. Certainly, This Is A True Soul Connection. Love Knows Just Where To Touch. Love Knows How To Heal.

Mystery men with strange persuasive powers, sometimes good but more often evil, are described and discussed in many books with no UFO or religious orientation. A dark gentleman in a cloak and hood is supposed to have handed Thomas Jefferson the design for the reverse side of the Great Seal of the United States (you will find this on a dollar bill). Julius Caesar, Napoleon, and many others are supposed to have had enigmatic meetings with these odd personages. These stories turn up in such unexpected places as Madame Du Barry’s memoirs. She claimed repeated encounters with a strange young man who would approach her suddenly on the street and give her startling prophecies about herself. He pointedly told her that the last time she would see him would serve as an omen for a sudden reversal of her fortunes. Sure enough, on April 27, 1774, as she and her ailing lover, King Louis XV, were heading for the palace of Versailles, the youthful mystery man appeared one final time. “I mechanically directed my eyes toward the iron gate leading to the garden,” she wrote. “I felt my face drained of blood as a cry of horror escaped my lips. For, leaning against the gate was that singular being.” The coach was halted, and three men searched the area thoroughly but could find no trace of him. He had vanished into thin air. Soon afterward Madame Du Barry’s illustrious career in the royal courts ended, and she went into exile. Malcolm X, the late leader of a black militant group, reported a classic experience with a paraphysical “man in black” in his autobiography. He was serving a prison sentence at the time, and the entity materialized in his prison cell: "As I lay on my bed, I suddenly became aware of a man sitting beside me in my chair. He had on a dark suit, I remember. I could see him as plainly as I see anyone I look at. He wasn’t black, and he wasn’t white. He was light-brown-skinned, an Asiatic cast of countenance, and he had oily black hair. I looked right into his face. I didn’t get frightened. I knew I wasn’t dreaming. I couldn’t move, I didn’t speak, and he didn’t. I couldn’t place him racially—other than I knew he was a non-European. I had no idea whatsoever who he was. He just sat there. Then, as suddenly as he had come, he was gone.

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But the metaphor of the living water means even more than that. Jesus is not just telling us that what he has to offer is lifesaving—he’s also revealing that it satisfies from the inside.

As long as you think there is a pretty good chance that you will achieve some of your dreams, as long as you think you have a shot at success, you experience your inner emptiness as “drive” and your anxiety as “hope.

Our herd was becoming well trail-broken by this time, and for range cattle had quieted down and were docile and easy to handle. Flood's years of experience on the trail made him a believer in the theory that stampedes were generally due to negligence in not having the herd full of grass and water on reaching the bed ground at night. Barring accidents, which will happen, his view is the correct one, if care has been used for the first few weeks in properly breaking the herd to the trail. But though hunger and thirst are probably responsible for more stampedes than all other causes combined, it is the unexpected which cannot be guarded against. A stampede is the natural result of fear, and at night or in an uncertain light, this timidity might be imparted to an entire herd by a flash of lightning or a peal of thunder, while the stumbling of a night horse, or the scent of some wild animal, would in a moment's time, from frightening a few head, so infect a herd as to throw them into the wildest panic. Amongst the thousands of herds like ours which were driven over the trail during its brief existence, none ever made the trip without encountering more or less trouble from runs. Frequently a herd became so spoiled in this manner that it grew into a mania with them, so that they would stampede on the slightest provocation,—or no provocation at all.

She reached back, curling her arm through mine. The unexpected contact caused me to flinch, and I was suddenly grateful for the veil. Like any of the Chosen, my flesh should not encounter another’s unless related to my preparations. It spoke volumes that Lady Kala had touched me.

A key step that can help us begin to settle ourselves when we are profoundly unsettled is to come home, to ourselves, in this moment, whatever is happening. This is one way of speaking about mindfulness, or being present: coming home to ourselves. When we bring our mind back to our body we come home. We could consider this state as our true home. This home inside of us is a home no one can take away from us, and it cannot be damaged or destroyed. No matter what happens around us, if we can find this home inside of us, we are always safe. When we touch this experience of coming home, it is like we have finally arrived home after a long journey. We experience a sense of peace and even freedom, no matter how confining the outer circumstances. Coming home to ourselves feels like belonging; it is a state that holds us and enables us to hold others. This is so important because we can live our whole lives estranged from this home within ourselves. My teacher Thay sums up his whole lifetime of teachings with one sentence: “I have arrived, I am home.” For him, the principal aim of mindfulness practice is to experience that we have already arrived, here and now. There is nowhere we need to run to or be, other than right here in the present moment. And we experience ourselves at home, no longer looking for some refuge outside of us, in some other place or time, when we touch the truth that all that we long for and search after is here inside of us. We can experience encountering this spacious and free place of our true home in unexpected moments as we spend more time tuning in to what is happening inside us and around us.

Simply in focusing our attention on the “enemy” Ignatius is rendering us a great service. To be unaware that we can expect resistance when we seek the Lord, or to be aware of this resistance only abstractly and very occasionally, if at all, in the actual living of our spiritual life, greatly increases the likelihood of encountering unexpected spiritual struggles. What is unexpected and finds us unprepared is difficult to overcome and can easily lead to discouragement.

According to Paul in Romans 2, the conscience is like a radio receiver picking up transmissions from that seat of justice.

and you can only know Jesus fully through the Spirit’s influence,

Ferry goes on to argue that almost all our possible answers to those big philosophical issues come from five or six major systems of thought. And today so many of the most common answers come from one system in particular. For example: Do you think it’s generally a good idea to be kind to your enemies and reach out to them rather than kill them? Ferry says this idea—that you should love your enemies—came from Christianity and nowhere else. And as we will see, there are plenty of other ideas we would consider valid, or noble, or even beautiful, that came solely from Christianity. Therefore, if you want to be sure that you are developing sound, thoughtful answers to the fundamental questions, you need at the very least to become acquainted with the teachings of Christianity. The

the author of Joshua is directing you to see that Achan has more in common with Jericho than he does with the covenant community. Therefore, this is not intended to be a passage about God’s people dealing with personal hidden sins. It is about how some people live in the middle of the covenant community yet aren’t really members of it.

Don't even listen to No body including your friends who tells you to Move On in life. They often will have destroyed your Motivation causing an unexpected anxiety, and a severe brain stress until you give up. No matter how dead serious they are in order for you to understand them, reject their Anti-statement with the Power of your Assertion. They will foolishly halter your situation you had been encountering over the past year, when it all started from the beginning. Therefore, you MUST KEEP MOVING FORWARD. DO WHAT YOU NEED TO DO THAT NEEDS TO BE DONE. That is the way of succeeding in life in order to prove to everyone you've overcome the Obstacles and your Anxiety.

I get a rush from encountering unexpectedly exceptional things. Even if I hate the thing, I still get a rush from discovering that it’s exceptionally bad. I could be injured and bleeding, but if I were bleeding a surprising amount, I would feel sort of excited about it.

Japan, a country that had done its best to have no contact with strangers and to seal out the rest of the world. Its economy and politics were dominated by feudal agriculture and a Confucian hierarchical social structure, and they were steadily declining. Merchants were the lowest social class, and trading with foreigners was actually forbidden except for limited contact with China and the Dutch. But then Japan had an unexpected encounter with a stranger—Commodore Matthew Perry—who burst in on July 8, 1853, demanding that Japan’s ports be open to America for trade and insisting on better treatment for shipwrecked sailors. His demands were rebuffed, but Perry came back a year later with a bigger fleet and more firepower. He explained to the Japanese the virtues of trading with other countries, and eventually they signed the Treaty of Kanagawa on March 31, 1854, opening the Japanese market to foreign trade and ending two hundred years of near isolation. The encounter shocked the Japanese political elites, forcing them to realize just how far behind the United States and other Western nations Japan had fallen in military technology. This realization set in motion an internal revolution that toppled the Tokugawa Shogunate, which had ruled Tokyo in the name of the emperor since 1603, and brought Emperor Meiji, and a coalition of reformers, in his place. They chose adaptation by learning from those who had defeated them. They launched a political, economic, and social transformation of Japan, based on the notion that if they wanted to be as strong as the West they had to break from their current cultural norms and make a wholesale adoption of Western science, technology, engineering, education, art, literature, and even clothing and architecture. It turned out to be more difficult than they thought, but the net result was that by the late nineteenth century Japan had built itself into a major industrial power with the heft to not only reverse the unequal economic treaties imposed on it by Western powers but actually defeat one of those powers—Russia—in a war in 1905. The Meiji Restoration made Japan not only more resilient but also more powerful.

There is an irreducible scandal, something traumatic and unexpected, in the encounter with another subject, in the fact that the subject (a self-consciousness) encounters outside itself, in front of it, another living being there in the world, among things, which also claims to be a subject (a self-consciousness). As a subject, I am by definition alone, a singularity opposed to the entire world of things, a punctuality to which all the world appears, and all the phenomenological descriptions of my being always "together-with" others cannot ultimately cover up the scandal of there being another such singularity. In the guise of a living being in front of me which also claims to be a self-consciousness, infinity assumes a determinate form"- Hegel,

Though most spiritual seekers start their search afraid of disappointment, Jesus says that he will always be infinitely more than anyone is looking for. He will always exceed our expectations; he will be more than we can ask for or imagine. So

Grant us, O Lord, a pilgrim's heart and a pilgrim's spirit. May we step away from the ordinary and accept your invitation to set out on a journey, retracing the footsteps of pilgrims who have gone before us. May we experience you as we enter a way of simple living, as we pray with our feet and our hearts and as we encounter surprises along the journey. May we break bread with new companions, entertain angels unexpectedly, be beneficiaries of graceful hospitality, and discover you in each valley and watershed, field and forest, river and stream, in prisons and churches, in art and in laughter, sensing your presence and love in all things. May depth, not distance, be the goal of our journey, and may we come fully alive as we walk the holy way with you. Amen.

Maybe these days you take some actions and steps that will lead you to the success that you want to achieve. You make preparations, channel all your resources into this process and move forward towards your goal with giant steps. You encounter a little problem in any phase of the process and think that you can solve it with a simple solution. The process seems to be working well, but you may be forgetting one thing. You may, at any time, encounter unexpected problems on the way to your goals. This is quite usual, however, sometimes problems which stand in your way seem so easy to solve that you find a quick solution with a very little effort and try to get rid of the problem. At first glance, things go right. You suppose that you have handled the situation successfully, but the surprise is not late; you realize that your solution is actually a terrible one that causes bigger problems in a way that you would never expect. Bingo! Never let the fact that finding a solution seems to be easy lead you to think that the problem is not serious. A scorpion is small, but it can knock you down with a single move. Good Boys Can't Do A Great Job (from my own book that I am still working on)

I do not like being thwarted, but shall I receive good from the God and not also trouble? The voices that say Recover so you can get back to normal, grossly underestimate the gift of this wrecked life. Why is it a gift? Because I would have no compelling reason to step from my comfortable existence into the quest for what’s next if my present security wasn’t taken from me. It is rare for a man to plan his own journey toward growth and change. Usually these journeys are thrust on us unexpectedly… If my ego tried to plan this journey, it would be limited by the expectations of what I would already hope to find. There would be no element of surprise, wonder, or faith--just a forced march towards a future my present self assumes is what I need. THat would not be a journey of faith but of control--and a fool’s errand. Faith is the conviction to trust that there are good things out beyond what I can see and would never know to pursue--glorious things God himself will bring to pass. I need those glorious things.

And yet, why do you think Jesus Christ came into this world through a pregnant, unwed teenage girl in a patriarchal shame-and-honor culture? God didn’t have to do it that way. But I think it was his way of saying, “I don’t do things the way the world expects, but in the opposite way altogether. My power is made perfect in weakness. My Savior-Prince will be born not into a cradle in a royal palace but into a feed trough in a stable --not to powerful and famous people but to disgraced peasants. And that is all part of the pattern.

Everybody has got to live for something, but Jesus is arguing that, if he is not that thing, it will fail you.

The proper biblical understanding of sin is much more radical and far-reaching. It can never be used as a weapon, because it will recoil on anyone who tries to deploy it that way.

Litost. The torment that arises when we unexpectedly encounter our own expansive misery.

Presidents may run for office on ideological platforms and promised policies, but their presidency is actually defined by the encounter between fortune and virtue, between the improbable and the unexpected—the thing that neither their ideology nor their proposals prepared them for—and their response. The president’s job is to anticipate what will happen, minimize the unpredictability, then respond to the unexpected with cunning and power.

Two weeks before the party, an old geezer cut her off in his golf car and almost caused a serious accident. The unpleasant encounter infuriated her, and after smiling as if nothing had happened, Hilda followed the reprobate home. The next day, she left a present for him in his mailbox. The snippet about the explosion in the Daily Chronicle the next morning was an unexpected delight. Apparently, the old fart had lost an eye and several fingers from the blast.

He never said what he meant. He never said what he meant.… All through their encounters, their clashes, their crossing of swords she had known that and learned a little to deal with it, and to translate, if only to herself, what lay under the stream of hurtful, facile words. And, suddenly, this time she felt panic, a seizure of fear so unexpected that she stared at him, quite unseeing, listening to the tone of the words. And then she saw what was behind it, and sat down.

rogrammers have “theories” about how software will behave when they change a line of code. Those theories rarely hold up to their first encounter with reality. Unsuccessful programmers could probably wax eloquent about how things should be different. Successful programmers just debug their code. Such a profession would quickly wean a person from idealistic notions about how to make a change. Successful programmers soon learn that it is more profitable to challenge their own thinking than to curse their computers when faced with unexpected results. There is no reason that communities could not formulate policy in a similar way. Two reasons that it is not is because of our still rudimentary understanding of system dynamics and our insistence on placing blame on individuals rather than trying to understand systems.

Freethinking, Lady Frederick?” She hated that name. It was like a shackle around her neck, engraved with the name of her master. She took a step back, her face openly mutinous in the light of the single lamp. “I don’t like being told what to do.” Captain Reid quirked an eyebrow. “I shall remember that.” Unexpectedly, Penelope grinned. “No, I don’t expect you will. But I shall keep reminding you.” Turning her back on him quite deliberately, she scanned the books scattered across the shelves. “Do you have that Hindustani grammar for me?” “This one.” He reached from behind her to tip a book out of the row. His sleeve brushed her shoulder in passing. It was a coarser weave than Freddy favored, which must have been why it seemed to leave such a trail across her bare skin. She could smell the clean scent of shaving soap on his jaw and port on his breath, almost overwhelming the small space, as though not being able to see him somehow made him larger than he was, blowing his presence out of proportion in the brush of fabric against her back, the whisper of breath against her hair. Penelope twisted around, so that the bookshelf pressed into her back, pinning her between the writing desk on one side and Captain Reid’s extended arm on the other. She tipped her head back to look him in the eye, the ribbons in her hair snagging against the shelf. Captain Reid made no move to remove his arm. They were face-to-face, chest-to-chest, close enough to kiss. But for the fact that they weren’t on a balcony, and there was no champagne in evidence, it might have been a dozen other encounters in Penelope’s existence, a dozen dangerous preludes to a kiss. But this wasn’t a ballroom, and this man wasn’t any of the spoiled society boys she had known in London. He studied her face in the strange, shifting light, as the ship rocked back and forth and they rocked with it, pinned in place, frozen in tableau, his own face dark and unreadable in the half-light. One might, thought Penelope hazily, her eyes dropping to his lips, attempt to seduce information out of him. From what she had heard, it was a far-from-uncommon technique. One needn’t go too far, after all. A sultry glance, a subtle caress . . . a kiss. It was all for a good cause—and it could be so easy. Or maybe not. Captain Reid was no Freddy. Stepping abruptly back, he favored her with a stiff, social smile, the sort one would give a maiden aunt who was being tedious at a party, but to whom one was bound to be polite. With a brusque motion, he thrust the red-bound book into her hands, gesturing her, with unmistakable finality, towards the door. “Here is your grammar, Lady Frederick. I wish you . . . an instructive time with it.” “Oh, yes,” said Penelope, with more bravado than she felt. “It has certainly been most instructive.

Surprise is an emotion we feel when we encounter the unexpected

Each day becomes as a learning environment that provides an unexpected teachings: . Everything you see is an opportunity to learn. . Every word you hear is an opportunity to learn. . Good or bad decisions you make each day are the opportunity to learn. Every experience you come across becomes a lesson of the day. Every failure you encounter can be your teacher.

When life throws you a curve ball, have a good eye.

Creativity is encountering something unexpected

Indeed, like so many encounters with Jesus in the Gospel stories, we might go to the Bible looking for answers, but we usually come away with more questions.

The best kinds of public spaces allow each person to do their own thing while facilitating unexpected encounters that could lead to lasting connections. Similarly, the kind of diverse democracy we should build must maintain respect for communities that prefer to stay among themselves yet encourage a majority of citizens to embark on a life that is, to some meaningful extent, shared.

Yet in his encounter with Jesus, something dramatic happens: he humbles himself before Jesus, recognizes Jesus’ authority as greater than his own and asks Jesus to heal his servant. Jesus responds with amazement, “I tell you the truth, I have not found anyone in Israel with such great faith.”5 This must have come as quite a shock to Jesus’ audience. Within the people of God, the community that carried God’s name in the world, Jesus has not found such great faith as he has found here in this outsider—a Roman centurion identified with the powers and structures of Gentile imperial domination that God has vowed to demolish. Jesus finds faith in unexpected places.

Jesus did not come with a sword in his hands; he came with nails in his hands. He did not come to bring judgment; he came to bear judgment.

With Play the Rules, you will get a no-nonsense, humorous glimpse into our everyday messy lives, always full or surprises, where the only constant is the unexpected. These are not “just made-up stories”. These are all episodes of “real-life”, personally cherry-picked from my own most revealing encounters and “urban adventures” – Somewhere in between business travels and pure enjoyment…

Life has taught me to omit the word “Iraq” from my responses when encountering strangers, because the word has been so demonized, stigmatized, and misunderstood that it may potentially cause unexpected reactions from strangers about whom I know nothing but my first instinct as a guiding compass. The word “Iraq” has the potential to drag me into long conversations I may not be prepared to have, either due to the wrong time, the wrong place, the unenlightened politics of the questioner, or all of the above.

They were at the top now, barking in that speculative, nervous manner that dogs adopt to reassure themselves when they encounter something unexpected in familiar territory. I reached the top of the hill with the sun full in my eyes, but I could make out the backlit silhouette of a figure in the trees, a nimbus of smoke around his head, the dogs inspecting him noisily from a safe distance. As I came up to him, he extended a cold, horny hand. “Bonjour.” He unscrewed a cigarette butt from the corner of his mouth and introduced himself. “Massot, Antoine.

Christianity is about God coming to earth in the form of Jesus Christ, dying on the cross, to find you.

What good is an underinformed religious leader who is at a loss or dismissive in the face of mystical raptures, unexpected occurrences at deathbeds, visions of self-luminous figures, or encounters with dead loved ones?

Some of the most unexpected encounters turn into enduring friendships for they bring spontaneous outbursts of joy..That which was earthly turns out to be heavenly for there came the beautiful coincidence of two hearts, meeting each other with a divine earnestness.

I seem to spend a lot of time being mildly disappointed by things that aren’t actually disappointing. They appear disappointing, though, because I’m constantly trying to be impressed or surprised by everything. I get a rush from encountering unexpectedly exceptional things. Even if I hate the thing, I still get a rush from discovering that it’s exceptionally bad. I could be injured and bleeding, but if I were bleeding a surprising amount, I would feel sort of excited about it.

If I want His promises, I have to trust His process. I have to trust that first comes the dust, and then comes the making of something even better with us. God isn’t ever going to forsake you, but He will go to great lengths to remake you. What if disappointment is really the exact appointment your soul needs to radically encounter God?

I haven’t given up on the spiritual life; in fact, I need a steady inner grounding more than ever. In my questing, I’ve come around to unexpected answers....I had a revelation. It was nothing profound, really, but it has changed me ever since. I realized this: I do not need to find and follow the perfect plan. (What a relief!) What I truly need is people I can follow—older sisters, brothers, mentors, spiritual friends who have been this way before. In my search for people over plans, I’ve found my way to faithful Christian women and men from across centuries and cultures, each with challenges all their own yet very much like mine. Their varied stories are thrilling, heartening, extreme, bizarre, even quotidian. For all their flaws and eccentricities, they discover, even blunder into, a spirituality of amazement and encounter God’s presence shimmering everywhere.

When organizations do not explicitly think about team structures and patterns of interaction, they encounter unexpected difficulties building and running software systems.

you’d like to encounter more of Jim Woodford’s story, we encourage you to pick up a copy of his book Heaven, an Unexpected Journey: One Man’s Experience with Heaven, Angels, and the Afterlife (Destiny Image, 2017). You can also connect with Jim at JimWoodfordMinistries.com. THREE LUNG TRANSPLANT RECIPIENT MIKE OLSEN DIED AND MET HIS ORGAN DONOR IN HEAVEN MEET MIKE OLSEN Louisville, Kentucky pastor Mike Olsen suffered for several years with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, a disease that kills almost as many patients as breast cancer. Mike was relieved when he received a call from the doctor letting him know that they had received a pair

The bizarre killing of the calf and the potentially deadly nighttime encounter with phantom creatures that were shot but left no blood and few tracks did not appear to fulfill the criteria of anything that could be reported at a scientific meeting. Nor could this kind of incident be written up for a peer-reviewed science journal. In fact, beyond the videotaped track in the snow, there was no physical evidence that this incident had ever happened. And at a subsequent Science Advisory Board meeting, the board made it abundantly clear that these events, in the absence of physical evidence, did not constitute verification of anything. Little did we know that these unexpected events would become part of an increasingly frustrating pattern of transient, difficult-to-interpret, but frightening events and phenomena that would never again be repeated in our presence.

Sexual attraction is one thing, but my body’s heightened awareness of this woman is different than anything I’ve ever experienced. The desire to have her again, overwhelming. With each encounter, my brain’s synapses reinforce the connection to Sophie. Mine.

The magic power of treating others with graciousness means when we don’t reserve the gesture for only those we think can do us a favour, we always have a great chance of encountering great people and great fortunes in unexpected places.

After decades of coaching, consulting, and supervising hundreds of coaches with clients, I’ve identified six main types of problems people face in any organization. If you prepare to deal with these six, not only will you solve them faster, but you’ll start to prevent them from happening in the first place. And when you know how to handle these common people problems, you’ll be better equipped to handle any outliers—and you’ll have the capability to take on even larger, unexpected challenges. Here are the top six challenges people bring to coaching: I have so much to do, I can’t even think! I don’t always handle myself the way I’d like. I feel stuck and have no idea how to move forward. I get annoyed when people don’t do what I want them to do. People push my buttons, and I lose it! My boss/partner/child/parent/friend/coworker/pet/neighbor is driving me crazy! (In other words, it’s not me—it’s you.) Which of these six challenges do you identify with? We all have struggles in our life. Heck, some of us will encounter all six of these in any given week!

She was clearly reluctant to tell me just how bad the encounter was, not meeting my eyes when she explained they initially slammed the door shut when she told them who she was. She didn’t leave though, and eventually they let her in and coldly disclosed that they knew all about me and my ‘ghastly’ mother. My ears started to buzz as I let that sink in, and I scratched at my neck, waiting for the lump in my throat I knew would appear any second. They knew about me from the start, Helene explained, when their ‘poor’ son turned up unexpectedly late one night and, pacing the living room, confessed that he’d got into some trouble. According to Jeremy, who did most of the talking while Kathleen sat rigidly on the sofa sipping a large gin and tonic, Simon had asked how he should tell his wife, Janine, and told his father that some financial provision would have to be made for me

Typically introverted and analytical, Fives don’t believe they have enough inner resources or energy to meet the demands of life. They feel drained by prolonged involvement with other people or by having too many expectations placed on them. Every handshake, phone call, business meeting, social gathering or unexpected encounter seems to cost them more than it does other people. Fearful they don’t have sufficient inner resources to function in the world, they detach and withdraw into the mind, where they feel more at home and confident.

But ghost stories show us a different concern, hidden under our bluster: we hope that the dead won’t forget us. We hope that we, the living, will not lose the meanings that seem to evaporate when our loved ones die. My own grandmother died, quite unexpectedly, when I was seventeen. I realize that it sounds absurd to say that about somebody who blew out the candles on her eightieth birthday cake in a hospital bed, but it was my first encounter with death, and it was unexpected to me. In my own naïve way, I expected her to get better and come home.

Even in 2019, we felt the simmer of concerns about "driving while Black"; but imagine, back in the 1930s when The Green Book appeared, all the way up through the 1960s, planning a road trip to visit a relative or a family friend and, in the back of your mind, having to worry about the possibility of an encounter that could be intentionally demeaning or deliberately threatening, or that could turn unexpectedly violent, even deadly. African Americans knew then that simply driving--being behind the wheel of a car--was viewed in many parts of the United States as an affront to social restrictions based on white supremacy. In many towns, cities, and states, any white person--not just white law enforcement--could stop and challenge a Black person's right, as an American, to be on the road: the right to be in a particular neighborhood, the right to own a nice car; and the right to simply enjoy the roadways of the United States.

If someone asks you for important advice about life, give them this advice: Be mentally prepared for unexpected encounters!

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We are not driven by unhappiness over our looks, or our status—we are not deflated by criticism as we were before. Our self-image rests in a love we can’t lose.

The feeling of loathing had as yet no permanence or strength in the dog’s soul. The newly awakened joy of life transformed every sensation into a great joke, into gaiety. Nimrod kept on barking, but the tone of it had changed imperceptibly, had become a parody of what it had been - an attempt to express the incredible wonder of that capital enterprise, life, so full of unexpected encounters, pleasures, and thrills.

Christianity is not a consumer good. You should turn to it only if it is true.

It may be no coincidence that the world’s richest man is a computer programmer. Programmers have “theories” about how software will behave when they change a line of code. Those theories rarely hold up to their first encounter with reality. Unsuccessful programmers could probably wax eloquent about how things should be different. Successful programmers just debug their code. Such a profession would quickly wean a person from idealistic notions about how to make a change. Successful programmers soon learn that it is more profitable to challenge their own thinking than to curse their computers when faced with unexpected results.

Sin is looking to something else besides God for your salvation. It is putting yourself in the place of God, becoming your own savior and lord, as it were.

It is because Jesus Christ experienced cosmic thirst on the cross that you and I can have our spiritual thirst satisfied.

The third thing Mary does is surrender completely.

The second thing Mary does is to express her doubts openly.

She reasoned, she doubted, she surrendered, she connected with others.

Try. It’s more efficient. You can’t go through life doing this the wrong way. The wasted minutes could add up to days. Weeks.” An unexpected giggle escaped her, as if she were a young girl being teased. “I don’t use a pencil that often.” Devon reached around her, his hands engulfing hers. And she let him. She stood still, her body wary but compliant. A fragile trust had been established during their earlier encounter--no matter what else she might fear from him, she seemed to understand that he wouldn’t hurt her. The pleasure of holding her washed through him in repeated waves. She was petite and fine-boned, the delicious fragrance of roses rising to his nostrils. He’d noticed it when he’d held her earlier…not a cloying perfume, but a light floral essence swept with the sharp freshness of winter air. “All it takes is six cuts,” he said near her ear. She nodded, relaxing against him as he guided her hands with precision. One deep stroke of the lade neatly removed an angled section of wood. They rotated the pencil and made another cut, and then a third, creating a precise triangular prism. “Now trim the sharp edges.” They concentrated on the task with his hands still bracketed over hers, using the blade to chamfer each corner of wood until they had created a clean, satisfying point. Done. After one last luxurious inhalation of her scent, Devon released her slowly, knowing that for the rest of his life, a single breath of a rose would bring him back to this moment.

Life is filled with hard choices, and it is childish to think you can avoid them.