Probability and fate

June 12 2009, 2:03am

A few weeks ago I wrote about narrowly missing an accident. My car was parked on the road just outside where the vehicle in this picture crashed through a showroom window, minutes before it happened. I was dropping my car off for a service. Sadly, the driver of the vehicle died recently. He suffered severe internal injuries in the accident. I’ve written several times about the vagaries of fate, including the story that a New Zealand family had a small meteorite crash through their living room roof. There is serious fate, like being in a car smash or winning lotto, and trivial fate. Sometimes when I’m walking to work, and a car backs out of a driveway at 7.10am, interrupting my walk and spewing exhaust fumes into my face, I speculate about the odds of that happening. The confluence of my presence and the car in that place at that time is an extraordinary improbability. Probability and fate are intrinsically linked, but separate. It may be possible, albeit pointless, to estimate the chance of a bunya nut falling on someone’s head tomorrow. The odds of being in a car accident are probably a lot higher. But there’s no point going through life calculating the percentages of a particular risk or opportunity. I find it’s better to deal with things as they occur and the older I get the easier it becomes to handle particular situations based on past life experience. Maybe I should be more proactive, more futuristic. I’m just comfortable living in the present.