Chance or Destiny?

One night into the disappearing Autumn days, I finished work when it's already ten and I had not eaten anything since lunch. I was waiting outside one of those typical Hong Kong style eateries for my takeaway. The road was damp from a shower earlier and painted an amber gloss by the street lamps. My mind and body were in a state between numbness and angst from the tiredness of a day's work and the hungriness which was worsening to a stomach ache. My eyes were following aimlessly on the passersby. The darkness around framed within my slightly blurry vision, a couple was approaching with the breeze like in a movie, cuddling and their gaze fixing on no other. They must have just fallen in love, my instinct told. Their complete absorption in their own emotional world contrasted an analytical question raised in my head from nowhere.

From the possibility of complete randomness to inescapable destiny, what do you believe?

Of billions of people in the world, how many we meet in our life? Suppose we meet a new friend a week and we're granted 80 years on earth, we would be able to know 4320 people. A somewhat regrettably small number in an age when we expect so much. How many friends on your Facebook's friend list? The average is about three to four hundreds, I observed. But how many are those we can truly call friend? How many people whose path we crossed, go on to be someone we truly know and love? How even more scarcely possible is someone who can be the love of our life?

In the first chapter of Essays On Love by Alain de Botton, the main character is calculating the probability of his encounter with his lover Chole on the flight from Paris to London. The answer is one in 989.727. He's being generous when what considered are within the events leading up to that decisive moment. What if they were born in a different country, a different time and even into another sex? We could push the question further back to the meetings of their parents, grandparents, passing cavemen and dinosaurs and on to the beginning of time and fathom the cosmic consequences before life ever appeared on earth. We can rehearse a slight heartache to merely imagine the improbability alone: a bigger big bang, a smaller sun, a different chromosome, a tyranny, a war, a car crash, an unanswered call, a discarded plan, a change of mind, a flight delay, a distraction from otherwise the meeting of eyes and the waltz of two heartbeats.

"...But my fatalistic interpretation of the start of our story was at least the proof of one thing: that I was in love with Chole. The moment when I would feel that our meeting or not meeting was in the end only an accident, only a probability of one in 989.727, would also be the moment when I would have ceased to feel the absolute necessity of a life with her – and thereby have ceased to love her."

When we are in love, we tend to believe that we were made for one and other. I met my wife at work. I remember seeing her name on the company phone list for the first time without having met her, a strange feeling was bestowed upon me for a fraction of a second. I looked back and took it as a sign of predestination after we fell in love few months later. (She had her sign as well.) You could argue it's just a freak sensation, the effect of a chill from the over-cold air-conditioning or the sugar burning from the digestion of the morning's breakfast. I doubt it may be so. But that's not really the point. Love is simply too powerful to make us consign such life-changing event to the hands of mere coincidence. Love makes us into a believer – at last, a higher being has intervened and granted us the miracle of love: the glances exchanged, the mutual longings, the reciprocation of tastes, the fulfillment of your ideals ("she does not only finish my sentence, she complete my life").

I often wonder what atheists and naturalists think when they fall in love. Would they reconsider their world view? (But I suspect not. Actually few of us would have the clear mind and still heart to reason when we're in the hands of Eros. Love has the reputation to be harmful to our sight.) Would they too have a moment of doubting their faith and a "Thank God" slipped out? Would they still hold on to their belief that all things were solely the making of pure chance plus infinite time? They meet their lover like dust gets in their eyes? Even so, isn't it paradoxically miraculous considering the magnitude of causes and consequences that all connect and intertwine like a record-breaking extravaganza of domino display. It takes only a misplacement, a miscalculation, a strong wind, a shake, an overlooked obstacle to ruin the show.

? An impersonal universe without God, implies a closed system where everything is happening in a mechanical way, only monumentally more complicated than the metaphor of a domino set.
? We can imagine a freak twitch triggered the very first cause (well, what caused the twitch to cause the first cause...? It's really the third???...) and what followed an exponential web (and sub-webs) of chain reactions, one after another, until a particular domino piece fall - one so happened to be the love one encountered.
? Doesn't that mean the first predestinated the second, the third and the uncountable inevitable?
? So we come full circle. To believe in chance we are left with no choice but to also believe in destiny?

Where am I? I'm lost in a tangle of hypo-anti-syn-thesis. But what are these really to do with love? A Nobel-prized logician can be the worst lover. Am I predetermined to love differently, had I happened to solve the mystery of fate?

I carried this mass/mess of thought into this unusually cold winter. A time when the passion of the couple I met by chance could have cooled. When the enzyme of love slows, habits gradually replace novelties, differences appear, faults are discovered, the first fight duly arrives, we are not so sure anymore. Our thankfulness turns sore. The conviction of our unmistakable destiny even degrades to the very opposite – total denial. What do we go from here? Is my choice itself also by chance or by destiny? The question seems ridiculous.

Perhaps my very first question is also ridiculous. We human have the tendency to fall from one extreme to the other. Our love is neither the sole making of chance nor destiny, but equally critical if not more, also our own doing. Otherwise, what is love when we are deprived of our freedom to love?

I realized the question sprung were not of any intellectual interest, but the raw feeling of amazement. It triggered a stream of thoughts not to answer, but simply to remind – the lost feeling of falling in love.

To ask such questions, to take this mental voyage to the limit of what we can comprehend, is like shooting us high into the stratosphere where we can glimpse the vast space beyond, the possibility and yet the incapability of going further. For a momentary ecstasy and the confrontation of the sublime, we're pulled, albeit reluctantly, back to earth. But at least, we've been there. We have witnessed the wonder but also its fragility. We have contemplated all the what-ifs, not necessarily to regret but to appreciate the scheme of things:

At the end of the novel Love In A Fallen City (傾城之戀), the author Eileen Chang (張愛玲) marveled that it might take the fall of a city to fulfill the love of her heroine. She might underestimate. It could have taken the working of the entire universe, and perhaps more.



I wrote the song two hours before we met.
I didn't know your name or what you looked like yet.
Oh I could have stayed at home and gone to bed.
I could have gone to see a film instead.
You might have changed your mind and seen your friends.
Life could have been very different but then,
something changed.
Do you believe that there's someone up above?
Does he have a timetable directing acts of love?
Why did I write this song on that one day?
Why did you touch my hand and softly say.
Stop asking questions that don't matter anyway.
Just give us a kiss to celebrate here today.
Something changed.
When we woke up that morning we had no way of knowing,
that in a matter of hours we'd change the way we were going.
Where would I be now if we'd never met?
Would I be singing this song to someone else instead?
I dunno but like you said
something changed.

[I remembered this forgotten song as I wrote. A song of my youth. It was out when things were about to changed.]