Blank Uncertainty on the Page of Life

Until I started typing – a few moments ago – I was staring at a blank OpenOffice page on my laptop. Now, it is no longer blank because I am typing on it.

Mao Tse Tung, one of the most evil people who has ever lived, once commented along the lines that the Chinese people were like a blank sheet of paper with endless possibilities. Of course, being an evil megalomaniac, it would be he who would decide what should be written on the blank sheet. What he wrote was misery, starvation and death for millions of his countrymen.

Enough of Mao. He is not the point. I'm not really sure what the point is. I think that what I might possibly be driving at is that whenever you wake up in the morning, you are in effect presented with a blank page in which an infinity of things are possible. You never actually know what lies ahead. You might think you do. You might know of a number of things which are scheduled to happen on that particular day, but you can never be sure how they are going to work out – because there is an infinite number of possibilities. In this respect, life is a game of chance.

There is therefore no reason to despair, and every reason to despair. Because of the random nature of the fall of events, there is a sense in which we can sit back and look at the passing of each day as a kind of observer. I am observing what I am writing at the moment. I do not know what I am going to write next. I didn't know I was going to write that which I have just written.

I might plan to do things. I might go to work in the morning with a number of things on my mind to be accomplished on that day. It rarely happens that I achieve everything I set out to do. This is not my fault. It is because of the random injection of serendipity which imposes itself upon the day. To really come close to drawing on the sheet of blank paper the things you really want, you have to be ruthlessly focussed, and try and bat away all the distractions. Sometimes you might appear to be a bit rude and abrupt, as you try and pull yourself out of conversations which, while they might be fully justified in themselves, are nevertheless blocking the way to you doing the very things you know you should be doing. And then the phone rings, and its all change again. You never saw that one coming.

This evening I went Ten Pin Bowling. I planned to score high and win my games. However, I only won one of the three games I played and was the worst player in our team tonight. Last week was the reverse. I got one of my highest scores ever. I suppose all I could say was that I knew I was going to bowl some games, but had no idea how the games would turn out.

That, in a nutshell is life.