Wisdom on how to steer your life in the direction of your goals
The world we live in is not perfect. It does not have to. But it does follow a set of laws that makes a few things possible and a few impossible. Humans, being a crucial part of this grand design, have carved out their own path and made their mark on the historical timeline of the earth.
Patterns
It is in our nature as humans to look for patterns and symmetry. It helps us navigate our lives in a more sensical way. The laws of physics provide consistency and meaning to the functioning of the universe. We are aware that if we jump from a hilltop, we will be dragged downward at an accelerating rate until we crash to the earth, suffering fractures and organ failure that will harm our biological systems. And in most cases, death. This is expected and we all know it. We have learned it by understanding the patterns and observing our surroundings, formulating laws, and experimentally verifying our theories. We may not have created these rules, but we have certainly understood them enough to predict the next pattern in this worldly order. Needless to say, we are yet to decode all the rules.
Randomness
There is another side to this coin too, where things are not so deterministic. They are not reversible in nature and do not adhere to a set of predetermined laws. Events happening on this side are probabilistic. They don’t have patterns or symmetries. We can only estimate the probability of occurrence of an event. Returning to the previous illustration, if we were to jump from a hilltop, there is a possibility that we might fall on a tree branch that was protruding from it and escape with minor injuries. Or, the moment before we hit the ground, we could possibly land on a truck loaded with flowers for a wedding. These events may seem highly unlikely, but we cannot ignore the fact that they can still happen. We may not perfectly time these events or predict them in advance. But there is no denying it can never happen.
We will still discover things along the way that we had not expected, even after knowing every aspect of the journey we are about to undertake. One way to look at this is that we cannot possibly take into account all the variables in play in a system- the Earth, here. And this is even harder because constituent entities are dynamic in nature. They are always changing. And it could lead to emergent variables that we could not have even imagined. In addition to that, unidirectional time flow blinds our vision to see beyond the present. This is where laws, theories, patterns, and symmetries push our horizon of predictability. They have their own limits though.
We are yet to unravel the reasoning behind the way this world operates. Even so, we are very adept at navigating in our daily lives. Our decision-making is greatly influenced by both randomness and pattern. While coincidences contradict the way we typically think about causation and effect, our activities undoubtedly have some impact. We tend to find meaning in both situations. We try to connect the dots. But, when we try to see patterns everywhere including randomness, we fail.
It is crucial for our survival that we draw lessons from these encounters with randomness and patterns, map out those lessons in a structured way, and prepare for future difficulties as they appear.
