Serendipity is the word we use when someone who is looking for one thing discovers another, more valuable thing. It is odd that we have no word for serendipity’s close-by but troublesome cousin, especially because it is a more common variety of experience. I refer to a situation in which someone looks for one thing, discovers a more valuable thing, but doesn’t know it. I propose the word ‘columbusity,’ in honor of Christopher Columbus, who in looking for China discovered the New World but persisted in believing he hadn’t.

Neil Postman, Columbusity, from Conscientious Objections, pp. 129-130

I disagreed with this essay as much as I have ever disagreed with anything of Postman’s I’ve read. That’s fine. But the word ‘columbusity’ seems helpful to me. I am not really sure at this point why. Perhaps it simply reminds me of G.K. Chesterton’s trek in Orthodoxy (and since it’s one of my favorite books…). Chesterton himself likened his pilgrimage to a boat-voyage:

I have often had a fancy for writing a romance about an English yachtsman who slightly miscalculated his course and discovered England under the impression that it was a new island in the South Seas. I always find, however, that I am either too busy or too lazy to write this fine work, so I may as well give it away for the purposes of philosophical illustration. There will probably be a general impression that the man who landed (armed to the teeth and talking by signs) to plant the British flag on that barbaric temple which turned out to be the Pavilion at Brighton, felt rather a fool. I am not here concerned to deny that he looked a fool. But if you imagine that he felt a fool, or at any rate that the sense of folly was his sole or his dominant emotion, then you have not studied with sufficient delicacy the rich romantic nature of the hero of this tale. His mistake was really a most enviable mistake; and he knew it, if he was the man I take him for. What could be more delightful than to have in the same few minutes all the fascinating terrors of going abroad combined with all the humane security of coming home again? What could be better than to have all the fun of discovering South Africa without the disgusting necessity of landing there? What could be more glorious than to brace one’s self up to discover New South Wales and then realize, with a gush of happy tears, that it was really old South Wales. This at least seems to me the main problem for philosophers, and is in a manner the main problem of this book. How can we contrive to be at once astonished at the world and yet at home in it? How can this queer cosmic town, with its many-legged citizens, with its monstrous and ancient lamps, how can this world give us at once the fascination of a strange town and the comfort and honour of being our own town? (from the Introduction to Orthodoxy).

Anyhow, Postman makes the point that we sometimes discover things we don’t expect, and then fail to realize that we’ve discovered them at all. It often takes me years to discover that I discovered something a few years ago.