Our Companion, 'Chance'

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(Image source: flickr.com)

A traveller in a passing train waved at a child. The child stood in the courtyard of a house close to the rail line. The child waved back and smiled. It is a light-hearted moment of a chance encounter. How many chance encounters do we have with other people, and how many planned ones? If we count them, what will be the percentage of each? The odds are that ‘planned’ stands little chance. 


Obviously, ‘chance’ weighs much more than ‘planned’. Yet, we all go about our lives assuming everything is planned and neatly in place. We plan everything years and decades ahead. 

The mind is a slave to this perceived reality. We have no rational or independent mind as we believe. We see everything through this perceived reality and imagine it is the real view.   


Accepting the role of chance could lead to positive or negative existentialism. You might feel that you have no control, but you could see 'chance' as an opportunity for innovation, improvisation, and creativity for something new, as the word serendipity suggests. 


Serendipity is active luck, the positive effect of chance. It is also about our engagement with chance events and our inclination to create value out of them.   


Fear of chance is the reason we believe in God. We say that everything happens for a reason. That gives us a modicum of hope. If there is God, there must be a cause for everything. 


All the same, chance walks with us always. We might see a hundred people in a single day or see nobody, slip on the pavement, make a new acquaintance,  bump into a friend, or we might not. We might die this day or live for another 20 years. These are terrifying propositions. Sometimes, we know, but most of the time, we do not. 


In recorded history, a few breathtaking moments were presented by chance that surprised us all. One was in the Monte Carlo Fallacy. An unprecedented event happened at the Monte Carlo Casino in 1913. The roulette wheel spun black 26 times in succession. The wheel had 18 black numbers, 18 reds, and one green. It was nothing less than a miracle that 26 times the wheel spun the same colour. Gamblers kept betting on the green, believing that the next time surely belonged to green. They lost again and again. In this incident, we see chance in its full might and glory. It also reminds us that in most cases, betting on chance will not deliver us what we wish. 

The early philosophers believed that everything happens for a reason. Voltaire declared, "Chance is a word void of sense; nothing can exist without a cause."

Even Charles Darwin believed that as our knowledge horizon keeps expanding, we shall find the real causes behind what we now think of as chance occurrences. 

Yet, as human knowledge grew, the reverse happened. Randomness, chaos, and chance were promoted to a higher level as important and useful concepts in science and philosophy. 

Chance commands a great role in evolution. Darwin found that species variations occur first, but they could be either useful or useless. Even the useful variations might get lost if not inheritable. If they happen to be inheritable by chance, they might become adaptations; the members of the species with that trait will have more success surviving and reproducing. Then, that particular trait becomes useful for the species as a whole. 

Physics, Mathematics, and Computing are three fields that immensely benefitted from accepting chance into their logical frameworks. From probability theory to quantum mechanics, chance is an active ingredient of science. This might seem contradictory. Science has been trying to find causes and eradicate chance, but it ended up accepting and benefitting from chance.         

So, what is the way forward in this world ruled by chance? We must accept the role of chance, but we shall strive to be our own masters. Acceptance and struggle go hand in hand in this effort.

We underestimate our companion, chance. How liberating it will be if we allow truth to prevail, to let our life philosophies be defined by the weight that chance commands. And begin our thinking there…We will find ourselves in a different, exciting world.








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