Presence in the Unexpected
Faced with the unexpected that thwarts the best-laid plans, should we resist or open ourselves? Perhaps the issue is not so much in this question. Let us explore the posture to adopt to enable ourselves to metamorphose what happens without warning into an engine of renewal and innovation.
Creative friction: when accident reveals
When we initiate a project, the main approach consists of foreseeing, organizing, planning. We seek to structure reality so that each contribution fits harmoniously toward the intended objective. Yet, despite all efforts, a grain of sand often comes to jam the machinery: a late participant, a faulty tool, a step that drags on. The unexpected occurs, and the question becomes: how to react? Should we stubbornly correct the trajectory, or welcome this event to attempt what I propose to call a “grafting of the unexpected”?
The history of human discoveries teaches us that accident can open unprecedented horizons. A few examples taken at random:
- In the scientific field, Wilhelm Röntgen discovered X-rays in 1895 by pure chance, observing the unexpected fluorescence of a barium platinocyanide screen during experiments on cathode rays. This accidental discovery revolutionized medicine and earned Röntgen the first Nobel Prize in Physics in 1901.
- In the industrial field, Charles Goodyear discovered rubber vulcanization in 1839 after accidentally spilling a mixture of rubber and sulfur on a hot stove. This error transformed a sticky and unusable substance into a durable material that enabled the rise of the automotive industry.
- In the field of nuclear physics, Henri Becquerel discovered radioactivity in 1896 while looking for something entirely different: he was studying phosphorescence and had accidentally left uranium salts on a photographic plate in a drawer. The fogged plate revealed the existence of unknown radiation, opening the atomic era.
- In the medical field, Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin in 1928 thanks to accidental contamination of his staphylococcus cultures, a mold Penicillium notatum that had developed during his vacation, creating a zone of bacterial inhibition, which he had the wisdom to observe rather than discard.
- In the artistic field, Jackson Pollock enriched painting with emancipatory freedom through his dripping technique, born from an initially unpremeditated gesture in 1947.
- In the industrial field, more anecdotally, Post-it notes, invented by Spencer Silver at 3M in 1968, resulted from a failed attempt to create an ultra-strong glue. It wasn’t until 1974 that Art Fry imagined their current use.
Louis Pasteur expressed it aptly: “In the fields of observation, chance favors only prepared minds” (Douai Speech, 1854). This preparation is not anticipation of the unexpected, which is by definition impossible, but the cultivation of fertile ground where the unexpected can take root and flourish. This is the difference between suffering and welcoming, between failure and metamorphosis.
Rhizomatic organization: preparing without fixing
The more carefully structured the context, the more paradoxically it acquires flexibility to welcome the unexpected. It is not about predicting the unpredictable, which is ontologically impossible, but weaving a network so rich in diverse connections that any unexpected event will find its place, even if it means reconfiguring the whole with the same elements. This attentive preparation does not lock the future; it cultivates the ground so that a graft can take, should an unforeseen event occur.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, in A Thousand Plateaus (1980), oppose two organizational models: the arborescent and the rhizomatic. The arborescent model, hierarchical and linear, collapses when a branch is cut. The rhizome, however, proliferates in all directions, each point being able to connect to any other. “A rhizome may be broken, shattered at any point, it will start up again on one of its old lines, or on new lines”. This is precisely the type of structure that allows creative resilience: not a rigid plan but a field of possibilities. This is how the Internet was built, on the spider web model, which does not collapse even if attacked from all sides.
This evokes the Greek kairos, that opportune moment that must be seized, distinct from chronos, quantitative and mechanical time. Pierre Aubenque, in Prudence in Aristotle (1963), indicates that kairos is “the critical instant when everything can tip”, which demands not the application of a preconceived plan but an intelligence of the situation. Hannah Arendt, in The Human Condition (1958), also says: “Human action is a beginning, acting in unpredictability”. To truly act is to accept entering the uncertain, armed not with certainties but with a capacity for adaptation, for oneself and for the systems we build.
The graft metaphor: transforming accident into essence
I borrow from horticulture the metaphor that guides this reflection. In a successful graft, the rootstock (the basic structure) welcomes a scion (the new element) to create a hybrid organism more vigorous than its separate components. The healthier and more robust the rootstock (the initial project), the more it can accept and integrate unexpected scions. The effectiveness of an organization is therefore not measured by its ability to foresee everything, but by its faculty to open possibilities.
This vision joins Chinese strategic thinking analyzed by François Jullien in his Treatise on Effectiveness (1996). He develops there the concept of “propensity of things” (shi): “Rather than projecting an ideal plan onto the world and then forcing the situation to conform to it, Chinese wisdom teaches us to detect favorable factors in the present configuration and rely on them”. The Chinese strategist does not force reality; he embraces its movements to better influence it. Romain Graziani, in The Use of Emptiness (2019), extends this reflection by showing how “emptiness is not absence but availability, not lack but openness to all possible transformations”. This active vacuity allows the unexpected to become a force of renewal rather than an obstacle. The unexpected then becomes not an obstacle but a revealer of the situation’s hidden potentialities.
To systematically refuse the unexpected is to refuse to admit the very nature of reality, always in movement, always becoming, it is to turn toward an idealized past (the initial plan) instead of embracing the living construction of the present. The Stoics already distinguished what depends on us (preparation, the quality of our structure) from what does not (the arrival of the unexpected). Epictetus, in the Manual (around 125 AD), invited this wisdom: “Do not ask for what happens to happen as you want it. But want things to happen as they happen, and you will be happy”. Easy to say or think in theory, but far from easy to integrate when we are jostled in real-life situations, because it is never comfortable.
Amor fati: from resignation to creative affirmation
Nietzsche radicalizes this Stoic acceptance into amor fati (love of fate). It is no longer just about accepting the unexpected but loving it as an integral part of our path. By ceasing to fight against reality, we allow it to nourish us, and initial plans flourish into hybrid creations, more alive and often more just.
This posture is neither passivity nor submission. As Clément Rosset emphasizes in Major Force (1983), Nietzschean amor fati is “unconditional approval of existence” that transforms constraint into creative power. We do not suffer the unexpected; we metabolize it. This alchemy requires work on oneself, a discipline of attention that Pierre Hadot analyzes in Spiritual Exercises and Ancient Philosophy (1981): it involves cultivating a “vigilance” (prosochè) that allows seizing the instant in its fullness.
Bergson, in Creative Evolution (1907), offers another key with his conception of vital impulse: “Life is, above all, a tendency to act on raw matter”. The unexpected then becomes a manifestation of this impulse, creative force that breaks our schemas to push us toward new forms. Welcoming the unexpected is aligning with this fundamental movement of the living that never stops inventing.
Thus, presence in the unexpected is not simple adaptation but the art of metamorphosis. It requires both rigor in preparation and flexibility in execution, structure and openness, rooting and flight. It is in this fertile tension between the organized and the unexpected that perhaps our deepest capacity reveals itself: that of creating meaning from chaos, of transforming accident into essence, of making each unexpected event an occasion for rebirth.
From diversity of connections to organizational flexibility
The effectiveness of an organization is therefore not so much measured by its ability to foresee everything, as by its faculty to open possibilities. He who has multiplied support points, who has envisioned each element not in a fixed way but in the plurality of its uses and interactions, will be ready to metamorphose the unexpected into a windfall. Hannah Arendt reminds us in The Human Condition that “human action is a beginning, acting in unpredictability”.
It is not about being subject to chance but being its partner, learning to judge to discern what it brings that is relevant, and sometimes refusing what is only parasitic noise. But systematically refusing the unexpected is also refusing the reality of the world, always in movement, and preferring nostalgia for an illusory mastery.
Presence as the fundamental grounding of our being in the world
Presence constitutes this fundamental grounding that connects us to ourselves and to the world, this quality of attention that transforms lived experience into inhabited consciousness. To be present is to resist the centrifugal forces that disperse us - the imminence that projects us into urgency, the denial that cuts us off from reality, the social injunctions that distance us from our interiority. Presence is neither withdrawal into oneself nor fusion with the exterior, but this creative tension between inner grounding and openness to the world. It is cultivated through paradoxical adaptation that requires sometimes absenting oneself to better find oneself again, through the complex geography of our inner states that vary according to contexts, through resonance with the waves that pass through us. Faced with drama that fractures, submission that empties existence, old age that isolates, presence becomes resistance and reconstruction. It is what allows us to transform the unexpected into opportunity, to maintain our integrity in turmoil, to create connection where solitude reigns. Cultivating one’s presence ultimately means offering oneself the present of the present moment, the source of all authentic transformation.
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