I’ve been slowly reading a few pages a night from Richard Powers Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Overstory where a common theme among the main characters is their love and fascination with trees. In one chapter Powers writes about Dr. Pat Westerford, a scientist, who figures out that trees are connected to one another through the soil and the air. Powers describes this insight as a “breakthrough” and it comes, “as breakthroughs often do: by long and prepared accident.”
This is an intriguing observation.
Sometimes we think of “breakthroughs” as appearing suddenly, but more often than not they are the result of work that is “long and prepared;” effort that creates the possibility for insights that might be perceived as serendipitous. But such accidents are usually only accidental in relation to what is “long and prepared.”
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