CHANCE AND RISK
(Post delayed to the April 20)
On April 18th as I prepared to go to my financial advisor I wondered what in my life, the important events, were a result of chance and how much was something that I had control of. Of course maybe this may depend upon how much I felt a need to be in control and how much time I spent carefully making decisions. Maybe my discussion of chance was really a discussion of how much I was willing to float along contrasted with how I could want to be in control. If I don‘t want to be in control and just let things happen then maybe that guarantees that chance plays a major role in my life.
For example, I feel that my meeting Kathe, my wife, and falling in love and marrying her was by chance. It was by chance the army sent me to Germany and by chance a friend invited me to Kathe‘s home for a visit where I was smitten. I was born in India, but if I was an actual Indian very likely my mother would have arranged my marriage through intermediaries. Through a careful process of making sure that I was of the right caste and social status and education and acceptable to the other family, my marriage would have been arranged with almost no input on my part. I would not have simply have been instantly attracted to someone I didn‘t know leading to romance and marriage, my marriage would not have been by chance at all, it would have been very carefully arranged. And the arranged marriage, which usually leads to a satisfying and happy marriage in India, would probably have been just as good as my actual marriage where I simply fell in love without considering all the possible variables. Under the Indian system I simply would have fallen in love, without romance, after I got married.
So maybe my perception of chance is simply a cultural convention. But often this doesn’t seem so.
All around me I see a huge amount of chance. In the Asheville Citizen Times today there is a discussion of the two deaths in the last year from falling trees in the Biltmore Estate, One just last week, with the overworked Asheville arborist saying that he was doing the best that he could to cut trees that might fall, but the chance of actually getting crushed by a falling tree was as rare as getting hit by lightning. Keep your eyes open, he said, and don‘t worry about it. And yet in the same storm as the second Biltmore death, while they were in Haarlem, Todd and Susie‘s porch was crushed by a falling tree that just spared their main cabin but would have crushed anyone sitting on the porch.
Kathe was sick and then we discovered she had pancreatic cancer and had three weeks to live. To me that is chance and bad luck. When I went to see my retinal specialist who has been giving me shots in my eyeball to stop slow bleeding in the back of my eye, I was told the shots had stopped the bleeding and I needed to come only every three months for a checkup. But then we got to talking about travel and how it was easier for me to travel than for him, when he told me that he had just had to cancel a trip because his wife had a small tumor near her optic nerve that was going to be operated on this week. One chance in a million, he said. I wished him good luck. And yesterday my son told me about a girl on his street who is the same age as my granddaughters and had grown up with them who went to Mexico a week ago for her senior year spring break and was leaping into the water with her friends who, suddenly tired, took a nap from which her friends couldn‘t wake her. After a visit to a Mexican hospital she was flown at great expense to Jacksonville where a renowned surgeon said that she had an inoperable tumor on her brain stem. She is now in Florida with her family with hospice care and a very short time to live. There were three children in the family. One girl had already died of a debilitating childhood disease. Both of these stories are stories of chance, of bad luck.
But maybe when I realize how often in my life I have escaped bad luck with a near miss in of a traffic accident I wasn‘t aware of or for some reason didn‘t I get Covid when others did, maybe what I think of as being a normal and expected life is simply good luck, for some reason not getting cancer or crushed by a tree or killed by cancer. In my 80‘s as friends around me die for one reason or another I realize more and more that it is simply good luck that lets me circle the world and have a marvelous month in Germany and the Netherlands. I need to delight, by good luck, in simply being here and being able to sit here and type.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 