The effect of serendipity is felt in lives around the world every day. It is a powerful experience, often overlooked, and usually not anticipated. Be ready for serendipity. It has and will continue to happen to you. Philosophizing about its causes I leave to your discretion.

There I stood in Nagoya, Japan in April 1993 - the year of the chicken. My wife Lorna and I had been walking the streets carrying luggage for 30 days looking for the supposedly easy-to-find English teaching jobs that existed everywhere before the Japanese economic bubble burst on March 13 - the day we left Atlanta to begin a new life there.

I had called every English school in the city of Nagoya looking for work, and I had been unable to find a job. English schools were laying people off in droves, and the streets were filled with professors and people with masters degrees in English. There were many people from Europe who were experienced teachers and multilingual competing with me, a psych major who had worked as a salesman for jobs.

We were beside a phone booth, staring at the last phone card we had left. Our credit cards were all charged up, our cash was gone, and if we did not get a job from this last person we had visited who asked us to call him, we were finished. We would return home, penniless, in debt, and having failed to find a place to live and work.

I stuck the card in the phone and made the call - it was a wrong number.

We panicked. I looked up his name in the phone book - luckily it was composed of some of the few Japanese characters I could read. I found it. I looked at the phone numbers of people with his name, wondering if my dyslexic Japanese friend had transposed his number. He had.

I dialed the real number, he answered, and we got the job, and a place to live, in the last ten minutes we had left to stay in Japan, with our last phone card, with no hope of continuing any farther, all because the owner of the little ryokan (Japanese bed and breakfast) we were staying in gave us one night free.

From that experience, we lived in Japan two years, I received a third degree black belt in Karate in Japan, I made twenty or so close friends whom I still contact regularly today, I discovered I am a writer, and I wrote a book about the experience called Year of the Chicken.

That, my friends, is serendipity.

While in Japan, we had many such experiences. We often intentionally took the road less traveled and headed down alleys and paths that were off of the beaten path. Once when doing so, we discovered a small, but very, very beautiful Shinto shrine in the middle of a neighborhood we had walked past a hundred times. We sat under the dim glow of the lights strung around it for a couple of hours just taking it all in.

Another time we stumbled into an interesting building just because we were trying to get out of the heat in Kyoto, and we found ourselves in Musashi Miyamoto’s living quarters in the Kanchi’in Temple quite by accident.

When my grandfather died, my father discovered a gas leak in his home. My father was near the breaking point working to shut down my grandparents’ home and move my grandmother to an assisted care facility. The doorbell rang. It was the gas meter man. He smelled the leak, and he violated company policy and crawled under the house and fixed it at no charge after seeing a shadow box with my grandfather’s WWII medals hanging on the wall behind my father.

When something unexpected and good comes along, or when you accidentally stumble into it, it is serendipity.

Why are people at work so often blind to the serendipity that comes along in their lives at the office but so open to it in the personal lives. Their friend is laid off and they moan and gripe about it, but rarely do you hear the follow up story about how that person found a better job and is much happier now. They complain about reductions in perks or pay, but they never talk about how they were in a tight spot and found themselves pulled out of it by a coworker.

Is it happy coincidence? Is it the hand of God reaching into your life and putting people in your path that you need when you humble yourself to ask for them? Do you make it happen?

One thing is certain - when the door slams in your face - the window opens. Go through the window.

To do this, you must be in a frame of mind to see the possibilities around you and take advantage of them. Be aware of and highlight serendipity in your work experience, for yourself and others, and take the edge off of the constant background hum of breakroom complaints about bad benefits and low pay with long hours, and you will do your own career, and your health, a world of good.