There was a torrential downpour here yesterday afternoon all of a sudden and while Lola and Daisy were inside, Coco was caught outside in it. Hopefully under a car or cover of some sort.
When I am in the office, I have my door open and tied with a gap of about six or eight inches to allow the cats to come and go as they please throughout the day.
Yes, I know it really screws with my air conditioning but the cats freedom is more important to me. And yes, it means the occasional mosquito and on a rare instance (three in the past six months) a snake or two slithering in and causing mild panic in the office.
But, as I often do in sudden downpour crises, I swung the door fully open and called for Coco to make a dash to the safety of the office.
He didn’t come and wherever he was must have been providing sufficient shelter for him, that it wasn’t worth the wet dash across the drive to the quiet dry of the office.
In any event, as I stood there in the doorway calling his name, I noticed the leaf that landed into the sign on the door in this picture.
Me being me, of course I took the pic. But then I just stood there for a moment in silence and thought “what are the odds?”
I mean, think about it. This must have happened yesterday while the door was slightly ajar for the cats. So because this is the inside of the door, the leaf had to fall stem first, through a gap of of less than three inches (as it’s half way across the door), and land vertically in a decorative gap between the door and the sign of about an inch.
And the nearest tree with that kind of leaf is about 75 or 80 feet from the door.
You could stand there millions of times dropping similar leaves from directly above the partially open door and never manage to get it to stick as such. And then imagine doing that from a distance of 75 to 80 feet away.
Not a chance in hell.
While it isn’t likely to make this evening’s news, this image did serve to give me food for thought overnight.
As humans we like to think that life is somehow structured and organized and that variables and unusual happenings can be explained away.
We use science and anecdotes to help us understand everything that we may witness along life’s journey.
If we can’t explain it away, we invent a god and tell everyone that god works in mysterious ways.
I am absolutely not rejecting science, even remotely. My engineering degree is a Bachelor of Science for god sake, so yes, I am a firm believer in science.
But at some stage, regardless of science or religion, it becomes painfully aware to some of us that life is simply a state of chaos.
Chaos, simply put, is the underlying principle of everything that happens everywhere to everyone. We make patterns out of certain happenings so that we can predict outcomes. For example, if you stick your hand in the fire, you will get burnt.
We attempt to apply patterns (incorrectly, may I add) such as if you are good, good things will happen to you.
But others are simply outside our realm of understanding or have too many variables and so we simply ignore. Like an airplane explodes in the sky and a child on his swing in the back yard fie miles away is killed by falling shrapnel.
That one gets put in the old god-works-in-mysterious-ways-box and on we go.
In failing to understand that there is so much beyond our comprehension, we invariably search for answers that can’t be found. And so we come up with fake answers. The world is flat. The sun god brings warmth and the rain god waters our earth.
As absurd as those statements sound today. At some point in time, people completely believed them. And those who questioned were seen as heretics.
But that is the thing about this endless battle between chaos and human understanding. Occasionally we are able to understand something. See a pattern and predict it. And so we buy into the concept that one day we will know it all.
Yes, there are some idiots who think they know it all already, but you republicans elected him, so we are stuck with him for the moment.
But the rest of us mere mortals experience a dawning early in life that reconciles our own limitations in life. “I’m no good at math. I will never understand grammar.” Or whatever our individual limitations are.
Yet collectively we behave as if we should have all the bases covered between us. But the simple truth is that we never will.
Chaos, the possibility of anything happening to anyone at any given moment, undermines the very best of plans. We can be plain sailing one moment and dealing with some catastrophe the next.
We can be driving along a city street with our toddler in the back seat and get t-boned by some drunk idiot, killing our baby and paralyzing us. If we hadn’t stopped to put the lid on our coffee cup before leaving the house we would have been ten seconds ahead in time and would have missed the crash.
Try explaining that pattern in that to the paralyzed ex-parent!
Life is a random, unsequenced, series of events that just happen … to us, to everyone. By trying to define it the way we do, we blur our focus from the importance of just experiencing it.
Living for the moment and loving those we share that moment with. These are the things we are really in control of. The rest of it is, simply put, shit happens.
… just a thought!