It's Scary When It's Close to Home
You turn to shock when you first hear it. The bridge over the river has collapsed.

It's not just any bridge, at least for those of us who live in the Twin Cities. It's one we have driven across many, many times. There have been times when I have have crossed it several times a day going to or from the U of M or a meeting or to a class somewhere.

It's gone. It fell into the Mississippi River. In the midst of rush hour.

Cell phones became difficult to use as people called loved ones, just in case. Then you want to go home and hug your loved ones in person.

Then you sit and ponder, as one of the commentators said on our local TV coverage, the chaos and randomness of the whole thing. A minute more, a minute less and different people would have been hurt. Another day, another time, two weeks ago tomorrow, it could have been my wife and me as we crossed that bridge because we missed our exit turn.

It is beyond imagination. We just ramble and wonder. Even now the experts are trying to explain it. But it probably was unpredictable. Random. Explainable but unpredictable doesn't make sense. But it is what most of life is like. It is explainable only in retrospect.

But when it happens, and this is encouraging, the emergency systems worked like they should. Very professional and very efficient. We may not prevent disaster, but if we can at least respond to it when it happens, we can ease the extent of its impact.

Or so we hope.

Yes, I am rambling. As I write this sentence tt is still Wednesday evening and the reporters are searching for words. So am I. Give thanks it wasn't worse.

And it doesn't change at all the next morning. It's just a little more real, a little more normal. How quickly a disaster becomes normal. Will we ever remember what the bridge looked like at 6:00 pm instead of the twisted rubble of 6:06? Today the politicians are talking and saying all their usual lines. But it is not, at least yet, a political story. Give it time. Somebody will have to be blamed. Sen. Klobuchar said it several times this morning in the space of a few minutes- bridges in the United States don't just fal down.

Well, this one did. We are momentarily shaken. Our world is a little les secure. But we will get over it. Except inside. Each incident like this reminds us deep inside that we are mortal and that there are far too many things at work in this complex world than we can ever take into account.

Sounds like powerlessness to me. So, turn it over. Trust in your Higher Power to lead and guide and do what is necessary for you to do what is necessary.

And don't forget to be grateful. It's at the heart of life.

It's All Random?
I was sitting and talking to my boss yesterday. For some reason things are unusually quiet at our treatment center right now. The number of clients and assessments in what has usually been our big groups has decreased while the groups that were struggling have increased attendance. It's kind of like a cycle, we decided, but a cycle not based on anything.

Which connected to the book I have been reading, The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. It has been slow going because it is not as easy a read as I would like, but it is challenging. Basically he talks about the important role that randomness plays in most major events and decisions. Most MAJOR changes in history and events that are literally world-changing and life-shattering cannot be predicted. He also talks about how we fool ourselves into thinking we have ways of interpreting these events to make sense of them. We base the future on the past- which, believe it or not, isn't all that good a source of what is going to happen.

My favorite example he uses is the Thousand and One Days of a turkey. For a thousand days in a row the turkey is fed and taken care of - care fit for a king. If the turkey were in any way conscious of what is happening, he would believe that life was nothing short of wonderful. Of course it will continue. He knows nothing else, he knows no other way of expecting life to go.

Until day 1001 when he is made ready for the Thanksgiving Dinner. Without warning, it all changes. While to us that doesn't look random- it is for the turkey.

Such is the nature of unexpected events and the role of randomness. We don't like to think that life is random. We don't like to think that we are that out-of-control. But we are. There's a lot more to the book than this, but it is the underlying assumption. It is all chaos. It is random. How can we learn to live with it? I'll let you know when I get to the end of the book.