Unpredictable Life—Part 1

Who we are and what we're doing at any given moment is heavily dependent on specific events that occurred moments before—in the time immediately before “now.” At any moment an uncountable number of possibilities could happen, but only one does. All the other potential candidates remain mostly hidden to us. In our ignorance we view the one event that did happen as something that must have been destined to be so, as if fate or some superior power had decided ahead of time what would happen to us. An earthquake will be viewed by some as punishment from God. Winning the lottery may be perceived as a reward for being good.

Even if we don't see a divine hand steering every event, we want to believe that our personal lives have order, that there is meaning to the things that happen to us. We want to think that things have a reason for happening—that there is a purpose and continuity to this existence.

On the personal level we especially want to see a continuum to our lives. So we tend to adopt the belief that there is an understandable order in our lives—even that there is some guiding hand that propels us down a certain path. It's almost as if we were destined to become who we are. That belief is mostly untrue. Our lives instead are largely contingent on arbitrary events that continually happen to us—events that are unforeseen by us and mostly out of our control.

When I was 17 and a new driver of that several-thousand-pound vehicle called a car, there were a few times that I nearly got killed—but managed to survive them all. The grace of God? Pure luck? My first job out of college depended on a recruiter arriving a week late on campus and my spur-of-the-moment signing up to talk to him that day. A week earlier I was otherwise involved and would never have met him. Where else may I have gone to begin my career? I bought my favorite house after a stroke of luck (for me!) saw the previous buyer's financing fall through.

Why do we marry the certain person we do? What determines when our first pregnancy happens and the baby's gender? What brought us down with a near-fatal case of the flu in 1998? What made my plane land safely and the next one crash? Wasn't my birth dependent on a random string of events—for example the one sperm out of millions of my dad's that led to me? What if my parents had decided to make love another night, or a month later, when Mom had a different egg in her uterus?

At any moment countless possibilities, innumerable contingencies are waiting, just a few seconds into the future. What I will end up doing in the moment following will be only one of those things—but until it actually happens, I could be pushed in many unpredictable directions. I plan to go outside and weed the garden, but the phone rings and the caller dramatically changes my direction. I walk heedlessly out the door, sprain my ankle, and spend the next few days in bed. I go to a restaurant for a meal, order the “wrong” thing, and come down with food poisoning.

All contingencies, of course, are not unfortunate ones. For example, I was dating a certain lady years ago, who seemed like she'd make a good mate; but we soon broke up and I shortly found a gal who's made my life far happier. I took a drive in the country one day and found exactly the piece of land I'd been dreaming about.

More on contingencies next time...