Rarity

Some things happen against unusual odds.

I was hiking with my wife two weeks ago, across a path in the high country Arizona desert. It was a nice afternoon, albeit one with a bit of winter’s bite in the air. We enjoy our treks through this land. It is filled with color, texture, big skies, and quiet. In one section of the path, there is a brief traverse of rock and sand that is neither flat nor steep but inclined to the occasional slip of the shoe. On this day, my right foot indeed slipped, only a fraction, and I stumbled, if only partially.

“You stepped on this poor cactus,” my wife noted. She stopped to bolster the tiny plant’s precarious hold on its history. I inspected my shoe. There was no evidence of damage, no protrusion of cactus thorn, no remains of former plant life suggesting anything more than a light brush with nature’s pricklyness. I shared the results of my self-inspection, to which my wife replied: “cactus needles can get through shoes like those pretty easily”.

Her observation was a mix of indirect chiding; I probably had worn the wrong shoes and I definitely needed to pay more attention to where I was going.

“Well, the little fellow seems ok,” I said, refocusing her attention back to the barrel cactus. “And it appears I was lucky.”

She said nothing. This is not always a sign of agreement.

We completed our walk, returned home for a cup of warm tea, and settled into the late afternoon sun. The cactus encounter had left my mind, a state unusually predisposed of late to clutter from too many other sources. Between past and future, there are some days when a hike fails to calm it, when directional movement is insufficient distraction from the vagaries of image, idea, and memory that jump into and out of internal view like excited children repeatedly leaping into a swimming pool on a hot day. In the midst of this mental melee, my right big toe softly signaled for attention, ever so subtly informing me that something was different, awry. Inspection of sock, foot, and toe revealed nothing. My gait felt ok. Yet when sock re-enveloped foot and foot re-nestled within slipper, that tiny call for notice resumed.

You no doubt anticipate where this is heading: the brush with cactus may have had more significance than originally appeared. Indeed, once bright light, glasses, and a magnifying lens were engaged in a detailed re-inspection, a tiny needle was located just beneath the nail of the big toe. Only a few millimeters in length, the broken spine was wedged precisely into the niche separating nail from its bed, its tip protruding just past the end of the nail. A tweezers and light touch extracted the glochid; a soak in hot water soothed the insulted toe and nail. But my amazement grew as my toe forgot about the matter. What were the odds of that happening? I could hike the same trail the rest of my life and that almost impossibly rare sequence of events might never recur. No evidence of cactus spine in sock or shoe. Nothing else anywhere on my foot. Just a single tiny probe of plant defense slipped into a sliver of human anatomic vulnerability. A one in a gazillion event.

Our lives are filled with cause and effect occurrence. Such linked experience is part of the nature of things and the ways things are connected in nature. A push here results in a give there. A pull there may be connected with a release here. We expect that a stumble into a cactus, regardless of the plant’s size, will have thorny consequences. Some minute portion of those encounters will deposit cactus needles in the most unusual of locations. It is like that with life. Run the possibilities for each day in all of their splendor and our experience is littered with rare events, strange and odd incidents, amazing strokes of bad and good luck. Many, even perhaps most, of these oddities are coincidences, “remarkable concurrences of circumstances without apparent causal connection” (from the New Oxford American Dictionary). But must they all be so? Just because something is rare, should it necessarily be seen as random?

I’ve had the good fortune to recently reconnect with someone from years earlier in my life path. This person has had an impressive journey since I last knew him. On the list of his achievements includes a continuous commitment to learning, to thinking, and to reading. His emails remind me of the difference between being widely read and being well read. I used to consider myself widely read; a range of titles and topics has peppered my bookshelves like intellectual trophies. This friend is well read; he understands and recalls the content of some challenging texts. A humble person, he also ascribes to me more cleverness in cognition than I possess. Have I read a certain book? I often cannot recall. He, on the other hand, can summarize the book’s thesis. He has done so sparingly, with gentle humility, for a philosopher or two of some historical repute, in the hopes that I can respond with a insightful rejoinder. Sadly, I’m too busy tripping over cacti, and wondering about the odds of having their spines implanted beneath toenails, to muster the courage to adventure into such worthwhile fields of inquiry.

But our brief electronic communications have opened up a topic which is perhaps informed as much by life listening as it is by complex thought: fate vs. free will. It seems so binary, does it not, the question of whether our stories are told through unfettered individual decisions or in accordance with the the pre-destined plan made by some grand wizard of the cosmos. We should have one or the other, full freedom to chart our paths or the patience to accept the course upon which we find ourselves. I know I should read more on this. I recognize that there are reams of brilliant perspective bound in the compressed pages of published texts and treatises. That legacy, however, is neither presently accessible or of interest for me and my interpretation. Because I believe, based on my experience, that what I do every day is a strange and marvelous blend of fate and free will. All the choices I make are exactly that: choices I make. And I make them all the time. Still, the options often placed before me, the alternatives I seem to have for things large and small, well those do not always seem random or solely influenced by decisions I have previously made. There is more at play in my day than me, my brain, and my agency. There is you, there is the natural world, and there is something beyond you and the natural world that we cannot yet observe or quantify or agree to name yet we still cannot ignore or discount or simply reject.

No, I don’t believe that I was meant to recently trip on a cactus, hours later find one of its swords tucked within a toe, and weeks later share that experience with you as if it were some event of existential import. Nonetheless, here I am, musing on the connections of cactus and book spines, wondering where I end and the world begins, awaiting the arrival of words that somehow produce themselves on this page beneath my eyes through the unusually rare ability of my fingertips to birth the immanent I neither understand, know, or fully control.

What is really natural in our world? What is the nature of wonder in our routine experience? Life is indeed a remarkable concurrence of circumstances and choices. The lack of apparent causal connection does not mean there is none. That uncertainty brings me comfort, and joy.