One of my favorite things is flipping open my paper dictionary to a random page and seeing what turns up. (See: bibliomancy.)
Chance has always been my best assistant
Director Agnès Varda in Faces Places. (Streaming on Netflix.)
I think, of course, of John Cage, and “chance operations,” and how Steven Johnson says “chance favors the connected mind.”
Also, Lewis Hyde, in Trickster Makes This World:
More conservative minds deprive coincidence of meaning by treating it as background noise or garbage, but the shape-shifting mind pesters the distinction between accident and essence and remakes this world out of whatever happens.