Serendipity

Do you notice happy coincidences? fortuitous meetings? Do things just seem to fall into place for you? They very often do for me, or, perhaps it is that I tend to be aware of or find them worthy of note or remark. The dictionary defines "serendipity" as "the faculty of finding valuable or agreeable things not sought for," and I just had one of these serendipitous little incidents. I'll explain.

I know there are newer ways of accounting practice but an organization for which I am the treasurer uses a ledger for record keeping, and today as I was bringing the ledger up to date by copying debits and credits in from the cheque book, I failed to leave two spaces for the end of the month of March to record month and year totals and went on to enter about ten entries or more for April. The thought of applying whiteout to correct all those entries was maddening, yet not doing the book correctly was more than my perfectionistic self could take. Looking at the entries, I noticed that I'd recorded one of the first April ones in the wrong order (fortuitously? lucky happenstance?), so all I had to do was whiteout the entries on the two needed spaces, reverse the order and squeeze in an entry in between two others and everything else fell into place. Instead of correcting ten or twelve lines it only involved correcting two - and all because I'd made a recording error in the first place. Serendipity!