Of destiny, dust and other catastrophes

One of my dear friends wrote recently on his Facebook status: “Destiny has a tendency to cross paths, but never unite them.”  This thought is an honest observation of life´s happenings. Honest, but grim. It feels bitter and hopeless somehow. Nevertheless, it was a creation of a great mind in my opinion only in its 21st year of existence. But it got me thinking.
 
Destiny has always played a great role in our society. It justifies one´s actions or gives reasons to abandon others. It works as a painkiller by offering the object to blame for one´s non-action, wrong-action or epic grand success and a happy forever-after. It makes us feel we have a purpose, a calling, a reason; moreover it makes us believe that somehow, if not yet, we will find our own. Some time, some day. That is all good and safe, but the problem arises when it becomes personified as a master that leads our life, even if only from one checkpoint to another leaving the paths in between for us to choose.

Leonard Mlodinov in his book “The Drunkard´s Walk” said we find the sense of Destiny by analyzing the actions in the past. As an example he gave the analysis of Chernobyl catastrophe. He found it was caused by the alignment of events that, taken individually, were just a regular anomaly of daily run of the machines. So to controllers nothing seemed strange. Everything considered wrong now was observed by people who then noticed the same anomaly over and over again, day after day. The catastrophe happened, because those anomalies aligned in such a way that caused it. That sounds like Destiny´s doing, doesn´t it? True. But to Life, he continues, that was just a statistical possibility. One of the least possible ones for sure, but it happened nevertheless. And that is why catastrophes happen rarely, but when they do, they struck us, because they are the unlikely event. Life, the way we perceive it, is a sequence of likelihood, so every exceptional story can be told as a grand scenario from the dusty bookshelves of an even grander master. 
 
What Mlodinov was aiming at there was, when one looks back in time, one finds specific events that by answering the question “why?” align into series that brings one to this very moment. Let´s imagine a guy sitting on a tea break after shopping with his friend. If he asks himself a big question, why has he, for example, ended up in particular life situation, let´s say, being in an unfulfilling relationship, he will find specific events that each support the previous and cause the following event, bringing him to that moment.  If he asks himself another less important question that is also related to that very moment, let´s say, how did he end up drinking tea instead of coffee? He will find different events that also bring him to that very point. If he asks himself yet another question, how come he shops in that specific shop, he´ll find another cluster of different causes why life evolved the way it did. And so on and so forth. Would then he say he lives different destinies at the same time? Or are all those her parts? What brought him to that very moment, then? Does destiny really care for what kind of tea he is drinking? There is but one life he is living, the exact one that is evolving in that very moment. One experiences millions of events in one´s life that are not independent of each other, but rather intertwined in a net of co-causality. Therefore one cannot say it was his destiny that brought him to whatever situation, since everything caused everything else.  Destiny only “appears” with a selective thinking backwards. Could one predict where his life is leading him right now? Could you tell me what your destiny has in its pocket for you now? Let s forget the 5 years plan, or one year for that matter. Tell me what is going to happen in the next minute.
 
There is a high probability of a certain event to happen, like, if you are about to go to bed, you might be sleeping, maybe finding this blog entry boring and closing it. But maybe, and I am being hypothetical here, you will get a text message from a person that would pour his heart out to you. Or you might experience a heart attack. Your plans for sleep just flushed.
 Life is a probability; nothing is certain, nothing safe. You are rich, now. You are poor, now. You are single, now. You are married, now. You are in love, now. Someone loves you, now. You think you have it all figured out, now; or you are lost, now. And this is all there is.
 
The picture grows even bigger when one lifts himself on a higher level and watches Life as a whole.  There is something in Mathematics called Brownian motion. If you imagine a dust particle on a surface of heating, not boiling, water, you would notice how it moves around.  It goes places, it travels all the time. What “leads” it is not a current of hot water, but molecules, that being warmed up, have aroused potential energy and they move in no specific order, bumping into each other, bouncing off each other and eventually pushing the dust as well. At times when more of random hits are pointed in the same direction, the momentum gets stronger, so the dust moves. And then another cluster of same oriented random moving molecules hit it in a different direction, so dust particle moves again.  And so it goes forever. And so dust “reaches” places.
 
This is a nice analogy of life, where we, people, are not only by-stand non-active particles, but molecules that glide on randomness of life´s potential energy hitting others while being hit by them. I am sure everyone made at least one decision that was influenced by a random event in his life. A coincidence we so like to call “a sign”. Where “a sign” is nothing but an event seen in the moment when we are looking for an answer. Had that same event happened in a moment, but we had not been looking for an answer, the event would have passed us unnoticed. Of course, hypothetical scenarios are not a proof, because the fact is, that event did happen and it did not go by unnoticed. Herein lays our need for purpose. Herein lays our reason for unhappiness and pointing fingers. But the reality of Life is, we influence each other just by being here. What is more, there is nothing personally plotted against us or for us. Life is bigger than that and it surely has no human emotion and thinking. Neither has Destiny. It is all our doing, our decision making and our will to make it happen no matter what. Still, there is no guaranty in it. The more we put out, the more we influence life´s course; the more we surrender, the more dust we become. We will come to places, that´s for sure, but how much of our dreams would come to life like that? How much regret will we gather, by simply letting loose? There is no right way. Life does not come with instructions. We float on the surface of life´s Deep Ocean and we have no option, but to surrender to the flow and try to surf along influencing others as we are going our way to the End, where our destiny will actually be revealed.
 
So to respond to the thought I started with. Yes, paths constantly cross each other and among the majority of those, there are ones that remain just that, crossings. However, upon some, upon those we consider worthy, we can decide to take an action. It is in our hands to unite them.  Nonetheless, no matter how small an event might be, once noticed, it weaves its self into the fabric of our life, never to leave again.