Sliding Doors

[tragula]

Does anyone have any interesting thoughts or personal anecdotes about causal chains. For example:

What whim made me decide to send my resume to a Pulishing house years back.
What role did my Aunt visiting town have since she helped me write a cover letter and push me to get it done.
What made a desperate Editor pick up the phone and offer me an unpaid internship.
What made me accept it for no money?
What made me stick with it even though I felt like quiting the first day and a hundred times after that when they hired me for real?
What made someone else hire my future wife?
What made me decide to give my future wife a second chance after she proved obnoxious on our first date--the nyc halloween parade?
What made me eventually decide she was the one and marry her?
What made her have an extra drink or two at a Halloween party and jump my bones and end up pregnant?
What's up with all these little twists and turns that seem to govern our lives?

It's amazing how random and unpredictable these chains are... Is it possible to make an accurate prediction on the probable outcome of a specific chain? Does anyone really stop to analyse future outcomes? How do we know we aren't going to get hit by a bus tommorrow? Or win the lottery?

[jyakulis]

Haha read einstein's dreams by alan lightman. You'd like. And yes all the time.

[Edmond Zedo]

You unnerve me, Tragula. And not in the fifteen year old hottie looking at me like I'm a pitcher of lemonade in the middle of the desert kind of way.

None of that matters. It's all just a bunch of luck.

[Miss Anthropic]

I's just come right out and say I totally disagree with Edmond Zedo. There is no luck there are no coincidences. Things happen for reasons. The trick is not ever to expect them, you just have to identify with them and appreciate them when they happen. The biggest for me recently was being out of a job, in school and completely out of money, suddenly, circumstantially screwed by financial aid, going into debt to survive, wondering how in the hell I was going to continue to pay my bills and mortgage, let alone pay for school. Around the same time my friend offered to fly me and my daughter to the East coast for a week in the summer. I went along with him on an audition for Millionaire in NYC. You were supposed to have an appointment (which were made weeks in advance) but I didn't. I got paperwork to fill out off the internet and just got in line with my friend and the rest of the sheep waiting to take the test. When I got to the guy with the clipboard checking people in I just smiled really nice and said I didn't have an appointment but I had come all the way from the west coast. He let me in to take the test. It was a 10 minute 30 question test on all kinds of stuff imaginable. I passed it along with 7 others out of a group of about 50. I got an interview and they said they'd send a post card if I was accepted into the contestant pool. Well, I knew in my gut I was going to get picked. I got a post card a week after I got home and a phone call three weeks later telling me I was taping in September. Long story short, I won exactly enough money to get me entirely out of debt. ( I hadn't worked in a year because of a job injury and had been going to school, so that along with debt I'd already had..well, you can imagine) There a all kinds of reasons I might not have been chosen; I was one of 200 people chosen out of thousands who auditioned all summer long at ABC studios in New York. I'm an INTP...it takes a lot of effort for me to exude charisma. Three others I auditioned with who passed the test and got an interview didn't get chosen.

I have another example that I won't tell entirely about meeting my former husband. (who now since he's my former husband I believe I connected with solely to have brought my daughter into this world) We followed each other (unkowingly) from Oregon to Texas and back frequented the same places attended the same social events and were finally introduced by somebody who was in my life for exactly 6 months (a co-worker) who had met him exactly one time (she knew his brother) but she was adamant that she introduce us and told me in fact, that this was the man I was going to marry. (I'm not that gullible, nor was I interested in getting married--kind of like I feel about it these days now that I've returned to my former not-married state) We had alot of bizarre parallels for about 3 years without knowing anything of each other until we met and compared notes. The REAL hows and whys of this are far to complicated to post here tragula, but you're onto connecting the dots.

[Edmond Zedo]

D'oh! Why can't I be stupid and happy, a-waiting for paradise? Because I have too many neurons, and they only get in my way.

[booyalab]

Fate is only fate if you know it's going to happen ahead of time. Therefore, since none of us know with absolute certainty that anything will happen- there's no such thing as fate. Even the scientific method depends on probability. (edit: as usual, the thread should be finished with my post..but as usual, it won't)

[Miss Anthropic]

Fate is only fate if you know it's going to happen ahead of time. Therefore, since none of us know with absolute certainty that anything will happen- there's no such thing as fate. Even the scientific method depends on probability. (edit: as usual, the thread should be finished with my post..but as usual, it won't)
Why would you have to know ahead of time? Anyway, the point isn't knowing ahead of time, or waiting for something. Of course if you sit around and do nothing, nothing will happen. It is about appreciating unlikely connections when you notice them.

[booyalab]

Why would you have to know ahead of time? Anyway, the point isn't knowing ahead of time, or waiting for something. Of course if you sit around and do nothing, nothing will happen. It is about appreciating unlikely connections when you notice them.

because, as it is relevant to how we perceive reality, THAT IS THE DEFINITION OF FATE. There is nothing to appreciate in unlikely connections unless you apply a meaning to them, and if you apply meaning to them, you are ignoring it's arbitrary nature. (you can appreciate the mathematics of chance in unlikely connections but that is not appreciating the connection itself)

[Edmond Zedo]

Of course if you sit around and do nothing, nothing will happen. It is about appreciating unlikely connections when you notice them.
That's iNtuition. I believe in intuition.