Interesting article on if things in your life happen by acts of fate...or just by chance...



How did you meet your lover? Your spouse? Your date from last Friday night? Was it love at first sight, a predetermined order or something out of your control entirely?

Questions like this may keep obsessive compulsives up at night, but the true answer can be boiled down to randomness. At least according to Dr. Leonard Mlodinow.

"One of the most profound effects of randomness is how it affects who we meet," says Mlodinow, who appears at the Santa Rosa Junior College on Feb. 9. "Sometimes we tend to assume there is a cause for everything—not that there isn't a cause for everything, but the cause can be unrelated to the event."
His book The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives is not about the stumble between downtown watering holes, as one might think, but about how our lives are affected by chance and random occurrences. These factors may play a more prominent role than we realize, he argues.

Sometimes the strongest relationships begin by chance. You lingered longer than normal for that second cup of coffee or took the elevator on a whim instead of the stairs, and in the process met someone special. If more people accepted randomness as playing a large part of shaping our lives, Mlodinow asserts, it could affect their outlook on life. "You would judge people differently," he says. "You wouldn't judge people on results. You'd have to look deeper."

http://www.bohemian.com/northbay/is-...nt?oid=2276003