Unpredictable

No one knows what is going to hap­pen today or tomor­row. There is a rea­son­able amount of cer­tainty in our rou­tines. The uni­verse is not a place of merely ran­dom chance. There is sta­bil­ity for the most part. There is also no way you can plan for every­thing that might hap­pen. Try­ing to do so would put you in a rub­ber room in a jacket that ties in the back. Even there you would find unpredictability.

Sooner or later you have to make friends with this — espe­cially if you do a lot of dri­ving or work with peo­ple. Every so often some­thing breaks, another dri­ver does some­thing erratic, or you watch some­one go off the edge. The key to liv­ing in even mod­er­ate unpre­dictabil­ity is trust. There will be the usual pre­dicta­bles for bal­ance. Storms pass. Peo­ple regain their san­ity. Social extremes find a mid­dle course.

The unpre­dictable is what makes a joke funny. It adds a few new patients to the hos­pi­tal. It keeps auto body repair places in busi­ness and thins the over­pop­u­la­tion of deer. Solomon was right: “Time and chance hap­pen to all.” Per­son­ally, I cel­e­brate that. Who in their right mind would want all of real­ity to be pre­dictable? Life, by Divine design, is engi­neered to be an adven­ture. The planet is a zoo with an atmos­phere that changes con­stantly. Peo­ple are just irra­tional enough to be funny and some­times scary at the same time. Add to all of that a pro­gres­sively aging body prone to var­i­ous dis­eases. It is the per­fect for­mula for an inter­est­ing life.

Dur­ing the next twenty-four hours, things will hap­pen that you can­not con­trol. They will hap­pen around you and some­times to you. Take notes. Some­thing mag­nif­i­cent is happening.