For the next year, every month we will be pulling prompts from our BreakBread World Conversation Card Deck and sharing our own responses with our community. You can try out the prompt with friends or over your own BreakBread gathering, an intentional process that weaves respect, care, and trust into our connection with each other. We believe shifts in how we gather can shift the conversation.
For this month, we will explore the improbable. This is the prompt:
In his book, The Black Swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb says the world is shaped not by predictable patterns but by “highly improbable consequential events.”
Share a time when the improbable showed up. How did it shape your world?
I met my future wife, life partner, and business co-conspirator by tagging along with a friend to a Christmas party. And it wasn’t love at first sight – it would take another three years of scattered platonic connections before we actually opened our eyes to the possibility there might be more here.
A friend of mine once lost his car keys and locked himself out of his car in the middle of a desert off a desolate seldom-trafficked road. After a day of fruitless searching and no hope of rescue he gave up. Sitting in despair in the shade of his car a small beetle appeared and tracked through the sand. On a whim he followed this six-legged sherpa who made a straight line to where the keys were resting.
Life would be boring if everything were predictable. And yet we spend massive amounts of time and energy seeking sanctuary from the unpredictable.
The improbable as Taleb refers to, is that outsized unpredictable event that defies all rational planning, sober prediction and carefully calculated actuarial tables.
Ours is not the first culture to attempt to mitigate the unpredictable. There have always been oracles, seers, shaman, and priestesses. The tools of astrology, tarot, runes, and I Ching are but a few of the ancient disciplines called into service to predict and guide. There have also been calendars, tidal charts, sundials, compasses, sextants, all calling upon the past to make the future more… predictable.
We have a powerful tradition of rational scientific evidence-based thought to wrestle any and all recalcitrant improbabilities into submission. The pundits, prognosticators, and the expert industrial complex all gang up 24/7 on all goings on that smack of dysregulated normalcy. If their explanations are not to your liking you can dial up any number of conspiracy theorists to allay any fear that something beyond the horizon of rational explanation is at play. Just chalk up the latest anomaly to deep state, extraterrestrials, billionaires, marxists, drug comp
anies, the left wing, the right wing. In other times it might have been satan, witches, faeries, and trolls.
And yet we revel in our stories of synchronicity and happenstance, the aberrations from our patterned otherwise predictable lives.
While the promise of certainty might seem to be survival, it’s at the edges of chance, uncertainty and novelty hold the promise and freedom of aliveness. These are the chance events that give shape to an otherwise flat predictable life. It’s your parents getting a job and moving to a school district where you meet a lifelong friend. A flat tire derails a planned getaway pointing you toward an unexpected reunion with a long lost cousin. An impromptu conversation intersected by a chance eavesdropper leads to a new job. These are the coincidences and synchronicities that beg for our attention. Walt Whitman purportedly said “the sidewalks are littered with postcards from god” (of which i have never been able to find the source) but it’s a perfect allegory for our wrinkled universe enticing us forward with unexpected treats.
What about you? When has the improbable showed up? How has it shaped your world?
Congrats!!!