Last week, an ordinary day turned into an extraordinary one when a commercial airliner, carrying 298 people on holiday, business and family reunions, was hit by a missile and crashed in a field of sunflowers, killing everyone on board.
Extraordinary events happen daily to millions of us doing familiar things in environments where our illusion of safety temporarily masks our anxiety about unpredictability. A family picnics under a tree; the tree falls. A man drinks coffee at Starbucks; a car plows through the window and kills him. A family sleeps on the 18th floor in their high rise condo; a crane towering above them for another high rise topples on them.
Random events abound, senseless, following no pattern and completely unpredictable. They exist as possibility until they happen. That’s the point; they’re random.
Here in California, we live in earthquake country. Will there be a BIG one someday? Sure. Maybe even in my lifetime. When it comes, it won’t be a random event. It will be part of the tapestry of geology. We can’t predict when, but we won’t be surprised.
Astronomers tell us we live in an orderly universe. Mathematicians predict sequences and probabilities. We can chart the possibility of our plane going down, but being shot out of the sky? Not even on the charts.
Perhaps all we can know for sure, and maybe not even that, is that when we breathe in, we can breathe out. So enjoying every moment may be the only protection we have against a random universe. Living in denial helps too.