In high school, I knew someone who was a genius at math and physics. He said that when watching dice fall, he’d automatically calculate the probabilities. Calculating probabilities or calculating luck? Or simply anticipating how a dice will fall?
A dice falling is just a blur to me, but sometimes a blurred state can be very accurate. I was in Hua Lamphong station in Bangkok. I’d gone to the last car to load my bicycle and instead of going back directly to my seat, decided to look for the pineapple on sale that I remembered seeing near the first car. The pineapple was gone, but guided by an odd intuition I decided to walk through the train cars rather than on the platform even though that would mean maneuvering through a cramped corridor. That’s where I ran into a friend I hadn’t seen in more than five years.
That wasn’t the first time on a Thai train. I’d been more accurate before when my reserved seat was directly facing someone I knew – knew from the past, but of course didn’t know he’d be on that train . Or so I think.
A friend tells me that some things are determined in our lives. They’re determined at birth because we pop into the world at a specific time and place that will never be repeated again. The only accurate measurements of such time and space are the positions of the stars. At the same time, we have volition and will. If the car is our fate, the way we drive it is our free will and we are wisest if we try to know what kind of car we’re driving so that our destinations are realistic.
In essence, we’re watching the dice fall at every moment. Sometimes it happens too fast for rational judgment to be useful. Sometimes the results look like luck, but maybe it’s just lucky that we had insight into that moment.
