Contingency is a big word, big because it has to do with chance and you can call chance many things: destiny, fate, probability, luck…..It’s something I think about a lot and I was delighted to have chanced upon this essay that looks at the nuances of chance. Michael Cohen talks about the odds of this essay being published and even the chances of the readers reading it. The same rules apply to the chances of winning a war or surviving an illness. Fiction has dealt with probabilities and this is perhaps why readers devote hours to strings of alphabets on a page– because of the import of destiny on the lives of characters in fiction. Anecdotes are full of how our own experiences influence the decisions we make and those roads we never take.
“We frequently speak of chance as being causative, an error that my gambling friends warn me against; there is no force operating more strongly on the coin to turn up heads after it has successively come up tails three times, four times, five times. Yet chance intervenes so often in what seems a mechanical thread of contingency that it affects all of us, however humble our circumstances.”
