We sometime hear people say with strong will and perseverance, they achieve great feat and success. Yet there are a lot of events people just can't control and very often they don't expect or see they are coming. There are so many uncertainties in our life that make us wonder whether we can direct or control our life. The very first thing our existence in this world is a miracle and we just don't know how we hit it. It is a probability of 1 out of 100 million (sperms) that you got conceived by that particular sperm which represents you. In fact, we exist because we hit the jackpot. Ironically, after you hit this one, you probably will not hit another jackpot from lotto in your entire life. Think harder, the human activities depend on the environment and human interactions and these in turn depend on some historical event as all events may affect each particular event directly or indirectly. For instance, if 淝水之戰 didn't happen or the outcome was different, we might not exist at all as we might have another set of ancestors and you no longer are you, you might be someone else.
Since we hit the jackpot and exist, how about our spouse? Are we sure he/she is the one we destine to have? For many of us, if we didn't attend the particular university, we certainly would have married someone else. Human encounters are very random, 近水樓台先得月, 一見鍾情. If you never get the chance to see the person, it is highly possible you will never marry the person. Also you can't control which university you will get the admission. Trace a little bit further, you couldn't control which school/department to get in when you took 聯考. Does this mean that your career is also a result of some random event? If we carry this logic link by link, we reach the conclusion that our life is just a chain of random events. Of course we can control something minor such as whether to eat steak or fish for lunch. But something so major like our existence, our marriage, our career, depend on something so random. Aren't we surprised and feel scared? No wonder people pray when they don't know what to do or when they are out of control.
I remember an English lesson we learned in the first year of our high school. The story goes like this. A boy took a trip to nearby city on one hot summer day. While he reached midway and had to transfer to another bus, he found he got 1 hour time to kill. As the day was hot, he walked to a shady place, cool and nice square with a spring fountain and trees. He fell asleep. Meanwhile, something happened around him and random things cooked up. An old couple passed by thinking about inheriting him, a nice young women walked near him and adored him, a pair of bad guys tried to rob him but got scared by a mad dog nearby, etc, etc, etc. One hour almost passed and the boy waked up and hopped up the bus to continue the journey. But he has no idea what happened around him in that one hour, let alone to guess what would have happened if he waked up at the right time. In other words, his life may be a complete different one depending on when he wake up. The interesting thing is that he just has no idea what happen around him during that fateful one hour. Is Life really a chain of random events?
