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February 15 - February 22, 2021
“In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.”
We have won the impossible, improbable lottery of birth. And we don’t know what will happen. We never can. There’s no skill in birth and death. At the beginning and at the end, luck reigns unchallenged. Here’s the truth: most of the world is noise, and we spend most of our lives trying to make sense of it. We are, in the end, nothing more than interpreters of static. We can never see beyond the present moment.
You can’t control what will happen, so it makes no sense to try to guess at it. Chance is just chance: it is neither good nor bad nor personal. Without us to supply meaning, it’s simple noise.
Epictetus in The Enchiridion. “Things in our control are opinion, pursuit, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever are our own actions. Things not in our control are body, property, reputation, command, and, in one word, whatever are not our own actions.”
who had learned, finally, to embrace uncertainty.
Admitting to unknowing, accepting a lack of agency without resorting to gimmicks, and instead attempting to analyze the unknown as best we can with the tools of rationality: those are some of the most powerful steps we can take.
“Those afraid of the universe as it really is, those who wish to pretend to non-existent knowledge and control and a Cosmos centered on human beings, will prefer superstition,” Sagan concludes. “But those with the courage to explore the weave and structure of the Cosmos, even where it differs profoundly from our wishes and prejudices, to those people belongs the future. Superstitions may be comforting for a while. But, because they avoid rather than confront the world, they are doomed. The future belongs to those able to learn, to change, to accommodate to this exquisite Cosmos that we have
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should chance go against us, all our skill can do is mitigate the damage.
laugher,
