Luck
John Scalzi wrote a blog post this week about the role of luck in his life. This wasn’t so much about winning the lottery luck, but about all the tiny and inconsequential events that line up just so to have a dramatic impact on the shape of our lives. Scalzi relates the sweet tail about how he met his wife. For this moment to occur, a lot of little plans had to change in such a way to put him at the right place at the right time:
If you add all this up, the odds of me having met my wife, given who I was, where I lived and what I usually did with my time, are so infinitesimally small as to be almost completely non-existent. Pretty much the only chance I would have ever had to meet her was that one time, that one night. You know, there’s a word for meeting one’s lifelong love on the single night in either of your lives that you would have ever had the chance to meet. It’s called “luck.”
I have thought about this a lot over the years. There are thousands, millions, of moments that could have gone differently. The difference might have been so minor as to not even be noticeable at the time. And any one of those decisions would have prevented me from being right here, sitting with my son on the couch as he watches the Mickey Mouse Clubhouse.
This is terrifying if you think about it too much.
One example always springs to mind. My freshman year of school, I decided to go to a party the night before a Calculus exam. I did not do so well on the test and, as a result, didn’t do so well in the class. I ended up majoring in English Literature instead of Physics, changing schools, and ultimately impacting the total makeup of my life today. If I had done a little better on that test, I probably would not have followed the same career path. And this is the path that brought me to a job where I met my wife. Life would be radically different today.
I think one normal reaction to this is to chalk this up to a higher power, to a divine plan. The whole idea of random happenstance having a lot dramatic impact on one’s life makes free will a bit questionable. Then again, one might argue that my decision to go to that party was not luck, but a decision, a manifestation of my free will. But the point is not whether I did anything to influence an event, but rather the idea that a very small moment can have a massive impact on the outcome. Maybe you get a C on a Calculus exam. Maybe an error is introduced during cell replication. One thing makes you change your major. The other gives you cancer. Chalking this sort of think up to the random nature of the universe can drive you nuts. It’s much easier to keep your sanity by maintaining faith that Things happen for a reason.
I’m sure there is entire Buddhist tract dedicated to the study of these points of change. For me, this randomness of just randomness. It’s not evidence of a master plan, but a prompt to remain mindful in my daily life.
Here is what Scalzi says about looking back upon these lucky moments:
When I want to drive myself hair-pullingly crazy, I think about all the ways it would have been so easy not to have met my wife. And then I call up my wife and tell her just how happy I am that she’s in my life, and that I love her and that when she comes home I’m totally gonna rub her feet.
I don’t see much point in thinking too much about all these past events. It’s about as useful as worry about what I had for lunch yesterday. Without sounding like too much of a cliche, the best thing we can do it put ourselves in the position for the random moments that will have the most favorable results–and make the most advantage of the spot where we are right now. There may be infinite alternate Matts in alternate universes who each live a different life based on these minor and random differences. They can have their fun. I have my own. Right now, that fun is just watching Mickey Mouse Clubhouse.
