#RunDipity

Last time I told you about the happiness that I get from running– it’s a moment of my own where I leave everything else behind. It’s an interlude of serendipity in which I make new, fortunate and unexpected discoveries. Serendipity means to find something pleasant and of when you are not looking for it. It means predisposing your mindset to welcome feelings and surprises. I found all of this in running and hence I coined the word RunDipity!

Being used to doing research, I discovered that the origin of the term serendipity is Italian. In 1557 in Venice, Michele Tramezzino wrote and published the fairytale Peregrinaggio, a story about the three young sons of the king of Serendippo,. You can read here if you want, it is beautiful!

Tramezzino claims, in the text, that he heard the fairy tale froma certain Armenian man, Christopher, who in turn was inspired by a Persian fairy tale from around 1300. In fact, Serendip is the Persian name for Sri Lanka (Ceylon). The story became known through the English version of The Three Princes of Serendip. It is from this version that Horace Walpole stole and coined the term serendipity, when in a letter to a friend in 1754, he wrote of a "stupidfairy tale" in which, during their travels, three princes discovered a lost camel and other things they were not looking for thanks to chance and sagacity.

The RunDipityThe main requirements of RunDipity, like Serendipity, are calm, inner silence, intuition, and wisdom, while while being aware of but not fixated on the end goal, It calls for a predisposition to accept the fact that in every discovery, as indeed in every aspect of real life, there must be some inherent element of randomness, the discovery of unexpected beauty, even in the race. I started out just like this: running to a goal; but then I found that it was not only this that led me to continue, but really the whole ensemble of energies and positive feelings that running brought me.