013: Unexpected collisions
How random encounters spark our creativity
When was the last time you had a serendipitous encounter that led to something inspiring?
Maybe it resulted in an unexpected conversation, or a new friendship—or simply seeing things in a new way?
These fertile accidents can be so liberating: the spilled coffee, the missed train, the conversation you’d never otherwise have had. I had this experience years ago while travelling, when I found myself in a train station in rural Slovakia with 5 hours to wait for a Budapest-bound train. Three Slovakian students with perfect English spotted me waiting and invited me to join them in a bar until my departure. We spoke about education and our respective cultures, and I was grateful to have a first-hand perspective on how it was to grow up in a communist regime—a perspective I’d never have had without being in that very place at that specific time.
Years later, in a short story, I fictionalised a completely different random encounter that sparked desire between a customer and a checkout server in a garden centre. As the customer packs her shopping, her bracelet breaks and the assistant scrambles to help her. Imagine glass beads scattering across the polished floor; tiny spheres of colour rolling into unexpected corners, each one creating possibility. It’s a metaphor for what wants to emerge: a new pattern forming from what was broken.
This is how creativity often enters our lives: not through careful planning, but through the grace of accident.
These collisions bring pattern breaks in our thinking and behaviour, and a different pathway forward—one that doesn't depend on perfect discipline or unshakable confidence but on the willingness to remain open to life’s unscripted moments.
Your ideas that haven’t fully materialised: think of them as fragments waiting for the alchemical transformation that only collision can provide. The manuscript you abandoned three years ago might find its missing element in tomorrow’s chance conversation with a stranger.
Cross-disciplinary pollination
We become most vibrantly creative when worlds collide within us: the lawyer who studies pottery; the scientist drawn to poetry; the accountant who photographs abandoned buildings on weekends. Each discipline you've mastered—even those seemingly disconnected from your creative ambitions—brings a unique perspective that can transform your work and experience.
Your professional background is not separate from your creative life but essential to it. The skills of analysis you’ve cultivated in your career can illuminate your artistic practice. The precision you’ve developed elsewhere in life, when cross-pollinated with intuition, becomes the fertiliser for creative abundance.
Pay attention to what inexplicably draws you. The book title that catches your eye for no logical reason. The stranger whose words stay with you long after a brief exchange. The image that returns to your thoughts unbidden. These resonances are not random but your intuition nudging you in a particular direction. They’re signposts directing you towards your most authentic creative expression.
Have you had such an encounter in your life—one that led to surprising realisation, or experience or shift of direction? If you feel moved to share, please tell us about it in the comments below.
Cultivating collision
Like a hand reaching out to help collect scattered beads, these fleeting encounters can reverberate through our creative lives with surprising power.
Creative abundance doesn't require grand inspiration or dramatic transformation. It thrives in attention to small collisions—the brief exchanges and minor accidents that we typically dismiss as insignificant. These moments contain entire worlds when we grant them the dignity of our attention.
Your creative practice benefits most not from heroic effort but from persistent noticing. The way light falls across your desk in the afternoon. The particular cadence of a friend's laughter, or maybe the texture of bread fresh from the oven. Each observation creates ripples of potential that expand outward, connecting with others to form patterns of insight.
Invite the unexpected into the field of your creativity. Take different routes home. Speak to strangers. Read outside your usual topic. Visit places that make you slightly uncomfortable. Each deviation from routine increases the probability of that fertile collision.
When you feel most blocked, don't force productivity—instead, create conditions for serendipity. Your creative breakthroughs often wait not in isolation but in connection, not in perfect discipline but in playful openness to the world's inherent messiness.
Place your creative self at the intersection of intention and surrender. Show up with purpose, then allow yourself to be surprised by what emerges. The abundance you seek exists in this balance: in the dance between what you plan and what life offers instead.
Will you gather the scattered beads of your experience and string them into something new? The pattern that emerges may be nothing like what you imagined—and all the more beautiful for it.
Love, Rachel
Community inspiration
This week saw the launch of
with its inaugural edition ‘The Remembering’, offering 5 essays on the theme of abundance. I have a piece in there, which draws parallels between physics, the element of water and the concept of service in business. More than that, though, this new writer’s collective is a powerful example of collaborative energy and the power of combined creativity. As a publishing model, it’s innovative and inspiring—so huge kudos to Phil and Carolina of Sacred Business Flow for devising and launching it.
On Friday 9 May at 6.30pm BST / 1.30pm Eastern/ 10.30am Pacific I’ll be going live here on Substack with coach
of Purposeful Connection. I’ll post more details in next week’s newsletter—but if you haven’t yet experienced a Substack Live, it’s a great way to experience ‘in real life’ conversations between the people behind the words on the page and spend 30-45 minutes learning about something new. As a way to ‘cultivate collision’ in your creative thinking, I recommend it!Creative inspiration
It this topic resonates and you want to explore further, here are some places to begin:
Books on the topic
A Book of Migrations by Rebecca Solnit. Solnit's wandering, associative style is an exploration of unexpected connections and the transformative power of journeys. It celebrates the power of following curiosity across seemingly unrelated domains.
The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron. Now a classic, this book facilitates the practice of spontaneity, particularly her encouragement to go on ‘artist dates’ (solo exploratory outings) as a way to create the conditions for the creative collisions.
Video
Where good ideas come from, a TED talk by Steven Johnson (17 minutes). Johnson—an author and expert on innovation—makes the case for what he calls the ‘slow hunch’ (ideas taking shape over time) rather than in an instant ‘Eureka moment.’ His book of the same name also deserves a read.
Memorable quote of the week
Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while.
— Steve Jobs (from the biography Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson)
What’s next?
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