by a thread

Had a nice convo with a colleague over lunch today. A much-older colleague -- i think he's probably about due for retirement soon. i've always liked talking with older people though -- actually i often prefer talking with older people than with younger people. Maybe i'm just an old soul at heart.
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Anyway, so the conversation very quickly swung round to the idea of contingency -- how so much of life is really so terribly contingent on so many things entirely outside our control. i guess maybe i have a stronger sense of this than most people around me of my age. When i was 27, my dad was hit by a failed brain tumour operation. Something -- my family never found out exactly what, because, you know, it was the brain -- happened during the surgery and left him paralysed on one side of the body. Over the next 8 years, we watched his condition deteriorate -- he suffered from several strokes, lost his ability to eat, drink, and, in the last 2 or 3 years, even to speak. Also in the last 2 or 3 years, he came down with prostate cancer: what one doctor called "the cancer that people die with, not of". It's rarely aggressive. But as luck would have it, my dad had the aggressive version. He died a few years ago -- his body a complete wreck. And all this, despite his very healthy lifestyle. He neither smoked nor drank, ate healthily, and exercised every day. He did all the right things, and yet was hit by a juggernaut of disease far worse than anything suffered by many who take far less care of their health than he did.
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i guess that's why i get so annoyed by a certain brand of positive-thinking, the kind that results in people not seeming to realise just how much of their life is really just a matter of tremendous, amazing luck. i mean, sure, positive thinking helps. i believe that, i truly do -- and i like to think that i make the fullest use of it in my own life as i can. But the kind of positive thinking i'm talking about, is that kind that focusses solely on the "I". It uses words like "I can", and "I will". But i don't think many of these incredibly lucky people realise exactly how much of that 'can' and 'will' is made possible because of things outside their control. They don't realise or acknowledge how blessed they have been, how little of what they have has been earned by their own efforts.
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i mean, yes, we can work hard. And work smart. And plan and strategise. But all of life is so contingent. i mean, you can die of a falling tree branch. Or there are those gruesome stories in Singapore of people walking under HDB flats and nearly being hit by a falling (suicidal) body. i mean, things happen. (As the Physics teacher i sit next to likes to say.)
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So many things come down to things we can't do anything about: where we were born, the kind of parents we had, our IQs, our looks, our health, the historical circumstances of our lives. Even so many of the things that people attribute to willpower and attitude are arguably at least partly due to biology and chemistry, really -- our genes, our hormones, the specific ways our bodies are constituted to function. Clinical depression, for example, is not about being unable to pull yourself up by your bootstraps -- it's about the chemicals in your body going berserk and wrecking havoc on your emotional state. Even how much sleep we need at night for optimal functioning is really beyond our control. i've always envied the people who need only 4 hours. That's about 3 hours less than the average person needs. Imagine -- 3 hours extra per day for 365 days. That works out to an extra 45 FULL DAYS worth of time a year compared to the average person. Imagine what you could do with all that time! Health, too, is very much a genetic lottery. i found out recently that 30% of the risk for breast cancer can be managed by things like eating right, exercise, etc. The rest of the 70% is just a matter of luck (or the lack thereof).
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Anyway, so back to the convo with my colleague. So there we were, talking about contingency and that sense that life is in fact so tenuous, so fragile. Everything hangs by a thread -- and so many people don't realise this. He told me a pretty funny anecdote about some advice he gave a friend once about whether or not to go and work in Africa. My colleague had lived in Nigeria for several years in the 1970s, and emerged from that none the worse for the wear. But when his friend asked if he should also do the same, the answer my colleague gave was this: "If you have the sense that your luck is good, then by all means, go. But if not, maybe you should think twice ... "
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i liked the way he put it, really.
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This may all sound terribly depressing and disempowering. But i don't see it that way. In fact, i think that an adequate sense of the contingency of life is indispensable for any genuine sense of gratitude for the gifts that life has blessed us with. Some of the positive-thinking people i know are so (forgive me, i know this sounds horribly judgemental but it's true nonetheless) incredibly arrogant. They think they've got it all made because of what they have done for themselves. They think that life is just a matter of willing things into being. They forget how much others have done for them; or, perhaps, their self-narratives don't make room for saying, "Yes, i was able to do this because i was supported by so-and-so and so-and-so", or "This was made possible because of such-and-such circumstance which just happened to take place at the time".
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Whereas, i think that to recognise that so many things in life really do hang by the thinnest of threads -- is wonderful for fostering a sense of gratitude, an awareness of grace. In other words: humility.
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PS:
That's what i like, actually, about LKY's attitude towards Singapore's extraordinary success. He always said it wasn't something we could take for granted. He was so aware that it could so easily have all gone so pear-shaped. This is not to say that he and his colleagues did not work as hard as hard can be, and smart as smart can be, and then some. No. It's just that he knew, and was not afraid to acknowledge in public, the role that sheer luck played in his life. i like that.
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