Think of what happened over the last hour.
A friend messaged, so we went for a walk. I spotted a perfect spider web by the door and stopped to take a picture. Mira ran around the deck, clutching berries she’d just picked from the tree. We wandered down one street, realized our friends were on another, and eventually crossed paths. We talked about nothing in particular, checked out a house for sale, and admired some cool Halloween decor. On the way back, my kid decided to tackle a steep slope on her own, and actually made it. Back home, my wife made mac & cheese and parathas while I changed and fed our kid. I dropped a few photos into the family chat, she piled toys on my lap, abandoned them for stickers, and now, I’m sitting on the couch writing this.
I didn’t plan or predict any of this. It was mostly random — or rather, a result of many falling dominoes.
Zoom out to the whole day: I woke up, brushed my teeth, had coffee. I had a few planned meetings, but what was discussed in those meetings was pretty unplanned. I moved between rooms, wrote a doc, stepped out a couple of times, checked twitter, called a couple of folks, moved a bag into the shed.
Not completely random. I did wake up in the same house I slept in, with the same family, and signed into the same work. But the rest of the texture was mostly random.
Pull back even further, to the last five or twenty years. Did I predict or plan I’d be living in Singapore, Ghana, and a few cities in the US? Did I foresee my college, my career, who I’d marry, trips, my kid, the people, the moves, the big and small events, the thousand weekends? Nope. All just came to be. A web of cause and effect, too vast to see whole.
Sure, I made choices along the way that shaped the trajectory. But what influenced those choices? Follow the thread back far enough and it slips out of my hands, to where I was born, to whom, ancestors before that, to the house and culture I grew up in, to things that happened before I can remember.
Now try the other direction. Fast forward through the next decades, all the way to inevitable death…I’m clueless. I have no idea how things will unfold. Nada. Neither the big turns nor the daily details that make our life.
So life, from birth to death, is all just unfolding, outside us and within us. Like improv.
Maybe we relax our grip and play the scene.
***
PS - are the details of your days less random than mine? I need to know.
I wouldn’t say that the details of my day are any less random but setting intentions about the day and identifying some big rocks is the mechanism that sets the course or the direction assuming it is otherwise a random normal day and nothing unusually random happens ! (Intentionally using the word random many times in my response :))