The Role of Chance in our Lives, or How a Single Moment Can Change Everything

We have differing perceptions or beliefs on why things happen: is it preordained, destined, fate? Is it the will of the Creator or a supreme being? Or is it simply the result of trillions of everyday life’s coincidences and random occurrences?

I’ve always been struck by the simplicity of chance, the accumulation of countless infinite actions and decisions, some of them random decisions or actions, that lead up to an event, whether it’s something positive like a career change, a marriage, or meeting a future life-long friend; or countless tragedies, like assassinations, unnatural deaths, or crippling injuries.

Any number of miniscule decisions or simple occurrences leading up to those great life events—or tragedies—might have changed everything.

So often a single moment or incident leads to a series of infinite occurrences that, by the end, have defined our lives. Here’s a few examples:

• Meeting your life partner because of a party you decided to attend at the last minute, or because of a new job, perhaps leading you to a new city and new friends who introduce you.

• The friend you meet by chance who changes everything.

• A coach who changed your life.

• A professor or teacher who took the time to care.

• Those who chose not to go to their offices in the Twin Towers on 9/11, or who, at the last minute, decided not to board an airliner, or simply missed the flight, which later crashed.

• The tragic automobile accident that never would have occurred if either party had left seconds earlier or later.

A single chance moment or decision can change our lives.

Maybe that chance encounter was reading a book that changed us. I know of several books that have changed me, often books I would never have read if I hadn’t been browsing in a certain place at a certain time.

So, I’m struck by the role that chance and coincidence play in our lives. I don’t mean here to marginalize those of us whose spiritual faith attribute divine intervention to what I may see as coincidence or chance; after all, it’s interesting to contemplate either way, and we won’t know who’s right until . . .