No Such Thing as Chance

"Have you ever thought about how small the chances are that you would be born? If just one thing in history had changed, just one of your millions of ancestors hadn't crossed paths at the exact moment they did, then you wouldn't exist. You'd never have even lived a single day." 

That bit was from Love Wedding Repeat, a mildly amusing movie on Netflix. The first chunk of the film shows what would happen if one thing, one thing had gone differently, how the outcome could have either been catastrophic for all or happy endings everywhere. 

I have moments when I think, "I wish Ben could have known Ma," but then I realize that if Ma hadn't died, chances are there would be no Ben. There would be someone else in his place, very possibly a horrifically crabby baby who I would not want to introduce to anyone. 

We don't believe in chance. But we don't see the system that's in place. There's a mind-boggling confluence of factors that we can't keep track of. 

In The Good Place episode Pandemonium, Janet, a sort of walking computer database with some nifty abilities (like Data), says: 

Janet: The more human I become, the less things make sense. But that's part of the fun, right?

Eleanor: What do you mean?

Janet: If there were an answer I could give you to how the universe works, it wouldn't be special. It would just be machinery fulfilling its cosmic design. It would just be a big, dumb food processor. But since nothing seems to make sense, when you find something or someone that does, it's euphoria. 

There's a whole debate about bashert. When dating, the conversation is all about cutting losses, settling, analyzing wardrobes, dissecting conversation, and I believed in it after all those years of dating. I thought choosing a life partner was going to require sitting down and rationally weighing pros and cons, but with Han I felt a "click" I never did before. I'm now all about the bashert, y'all. 

If we knew all the answers—tzaadik v'ra lo, what does the next world look like, why do I suddenly need something the second I throw it out after it was sitting in a closet for five years—what would be the point? 

But consider: We are all miracles. I'm not the first person to gaze, dewy-eyed, at her baby and marvel at all of his working parts, his developing brain, the emerging personality. Han recalled that his friend, a doctor, had to first study embryology, the subject of all things that can go wrong in utero. 

Whatever happens is supposed to happen. I was supposed to date for freakin' forever. Ma was supposed to die. Han and I were supposed to marry when we did. Ben was supposed to be born.  

We don't know why. We didn't program this simulation. We can only recognize the beauty in it.