Unemployment Day Ten - "Will Work for Cookies"

You know it’s a good day when you wake up, get some work done, go for a walk while the weather is nice and come back to find that your 20-month-old nephew sent you a box of home-made cookies. He may have had a little help from his mother, but it’s still pretty good. It’s a nice big shoebox filled with chocolate chip goodness. And even though he packed it full, I can’t guarantee that there will be any left when Christine gets home on Friday. She may be in the midst of mid-seventy degree weather, but I have pile of Jonah cookies to devour. I’m not going to say who has the better deal.

Because, I’m in the habit of over analyzing things in this blog, let’s look at cookies. From what I gather, the cookie came about by accident. Like so many other wonderful things in the world, someone stumbled across it while trying to follow a recipe. A baker in ancient Persia was going for something perfect. An exquisite cake of some sort. He was trying to color within the lines. What he got was a cookie. I’ll bet the other bakers laughed at him.

What if Alexander Fleming hadn’t accidentally left a couple of those Petri dishes out in the open while he went on vacation? No penicillin.

What would we be missing in our lives if scientist James Wright hadn’t accidentally mixed Boric acid with some fancy-sounding rubber-like thingamjig? Silly Putty. My childhood might not be the same.

The microwave oven was discovered when some scientist was working on a radar system for WWII airplanes and the candy bar in his pocket melted. As far as I’m concerned he got lucky in a number of significant ways during that experiment.

And then there is the all-time accident that ended up brightening the lives of human beings from that moment onward. Probably early in the fourteenth century some monks in Belgium left a bit of yeast a little too long in a dish. Whoop Dang Brandeen, we got us some brewskies growin' over here!

What’s my point? If I have to have one, it would be that there have been some very good things that have come out of the unexpected. You step into the unknown, set up some experiments and hope you strike gold…or fermented hops. In screenwriting class, my instructor called these the Glorious Incongruities of Life. I didn’t even have to look in my notes to remember that. It stuck with me because I think those incongruities, or happy accidents, or falling forward, or whatever you want to call them really happen. But only if you’re looking for them. You can’t throw out the Petri dish because it’s got a little mold in it. So, does that make these things truly accidents?

Maybe not. Maybe those people were actually on the lookout for something outside the experiment. Maybe they didn’t know what that “thing” would be, but they were open to them.

So, that's what I'll try to do while building my freelance business and generating work; open myself to the accidents. After all, it worked for these people and some of them won the Nobel Prize. Here’s to some Glorious Incongruities stemming from an unexpected unemployment.

Dang, these cookies are good. I think I have a new freelance slogan:
Have skillz. Will work for cookies.