Unbroken Stride

A rather unexpected thing happened to me earlier today, twice. I was out running some errands, and my travels required me to cross a specific street. I don't normally like having to cross this street, as the cross traffic on that road tends to be somewhat heavy (the street has one of the two in-town bridges a few blocks down). This is made even worse by the fact that I tend to be traveling on foot (my destinations are usually within walking distance), so more often than not, I am stuck waiting for a sufficiently large gap in traffic to appear that I can safely cross.

That seems like a sufficient amount of exposition. The unexpected thing was that I was able to cross the street totally unimpeded; no strings of cars coming from one way, then the other way, no spending ten minutes standing and waiting in mind-numbing boredom. I just walked up to the intersection, and walked right across, not having to break my stride at all. This has happened to me before, but is such a rare occurrence that I tend to not expect it to happen (I'd rather be happily surprised than repeatedly disappointed). What makes it even more surprising is that it happened both times (heading out, heading home) I crossed the street! Admittedly, the second time around, there were vehicles coming from both sides. However, the closest of them were still at least three blocks away, giving me plenty of time to cross in a leisurely manner.

During a broadcast of "A Prairie Home Companion", Garrison Keillor talked about riding on the subway in New York City. He mentioned an occurrence that happens to riders very rarely (once every two or three months, and that's if you ride the subway every day or nearly every day). Everything lines up just right. You reach the bottom of the stairs just as the subway train is pulling in at the station. You pick up the pace a little as you walk across the floor. The doors open up, and you just walk in like you own the place! Others passengers HATE it when people do that, mostly because they were so fortunate in their timing.

All of this leads me to wonder, how much of that falls to random chance? Indeed, how much of LIFE falls to random chance? Certainly, we can (and certainly many people will) do things (some legal, some illegal) to stack the odds in our favor and/or take advantage of naturally occurring events (I think it helped that I was crossing the street in the middle of the day, rather than late afternoon). Depending on who you ask, a varying percentage of success is showing up or being in the right place at the right time. However, it is rare that we know where to show up or when to be there to be successful, and our chances are diminished by the fact that, more often than not, we are in a state of competition with other people.

Certainly, it doesn't ALL boil down to being lucky. Brains, dedication, hard work - those help. But is that really enough? Most of the people on top are there because they started off on top and stayed there. They had advantages most people can only imagine (if that), and continue to have advantages that the average person will never see, no matter how dedicated or hard working they are. That's hardly surprising though. I believe it was Rene Descartes (I might be mistaken on that, and if so, I apologize) who put forward the idea of power and control: those with power over the system will alter the system to keep themselves in power. (An example I can give is Wisconsin governor Scott Walker: one of the first things he did after nearly being recalled was get rid of the recall process.) A more modern (and simpler) version is sometimes referred to as the "Golden Rule": Those with the gold make the rules. They are on top because they started at the top, and can change the system to ensure that they stay on top.