It always seems that tragedy clusters. The last two weeks were rough and the hits just seem to keep coming. It's not about me, none of it is except for my hand sprouting some obscure and bizarre condition, but it all affects me. Too much death and too much sadness.
At times like these, it's easy to fall back on superstition. It's easy to believe that a cluster like this proves some sort of divine meddling in the organization of the universe, but it doesn't. All it does is demonstrate that events in life follow a random distribution pattern. I always end up thinking of a scene from "Numbers." "Numbers" was a pretty seriously flawed procedural show wherein one of the main characters is a math prodigy. In any case, he at one point has to explain to a room full of detectives how real random events work. He starts by pulling out a piece of paper and asking each of them to put a dot on the paper in a random place. Each detective does this and they end up with a sheet of paper with a bunch of relatively evenly spaced dots. Our prodigy explains, that's not random. It's not random because each of the detectives looked at the paper before placing his or her dot and subconsciously placed their dot away from the others. People assume on some level that random means even distribution. A truly random set would include isolated dots, yes, but also clusters of dots because that is what random implies: without pattern.
Life is like that too. I can count out between 6 and 10 events ranging from moderately distressing to actively upsetting that happened in the last 14 days. That's a lot by any measure, but it's just a cluster. I expect that I experience just as many "good event" clusters as bad ones, but I don't think most humans are programmed to really register a series of fortunate coincidences in the same introspective way that we do misfortune.
Some people notice the good equally as much as, or more than, the bad. I'm not one of those people, but I would like to be.
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