The chances of you preferring pineapples on pizza are 1 in 3. The odds of you thinking
it’s a culinary crime are 1 in 5. The estimated probability of you being born in a war zone
in 1 in 6. The odds of your parents meeting are perhaps 1 in 10,000, and since a man
produces 100-300 million sperm in each ejaculation, the chances of your exact sperm
winning the race are about one in a million. So, according to this real smart professor
from Harvard, the odds of you being here, breathing this air, are approximately 1 in
10²⁶⁸⁵⁰⁰⁰, which is essentially one in ten followed by a whopping 2.7 MILLION zeroes!

Let that sink in.

My eyes almost popped out of their sockets at that.

These numbers are so crazy that it’s impossible for us to even imagine them. Like, what do you mean by a million zeroes?! What does that even look like? And what does that
make us? More important or nothing at all? I don’t mean to give you an existential crisis
right now—you can procrastinate that for later like all your other tasks—but I just want
you to remember that being born is the biggest miracle that could ever happen to you. But that doesn’t mean it’s the only one. This is where the beauty of math comes in.

You ever think about the probability of you and your sibling thinking the same thing at
the same time? Or the probability of them not hating you? Or the odds of the exact
same series of events that led you to your best friend or your significant other? I have a
funny story for this.

So, I met someone recently—let’s call them Patroclus because this accident, like his death, at least for now, is essentially pointless, but the way it happened is kind of crazy. For context, Patroclus is a student who also happens to work sometimes for an independent publishing house, new and emerging in my city. Funny enough, he also happens to be quite angelic in the way he looks, with a slight lisp that sounds like petals brushing against each other. And life had given me three whole chances of meeting Pat that I had unknowingly dodged each time.

The first time I could’ve met him was at this book fair that lasted for three days. My
friend asked me to go at least six times, but of course, I chose my bed and rewatching
my favorite show for the thirty-sixth time instead. So, in mathematical terms, I
successfully dodged the almost 100% chance of meeting Pat. Cut to two months
later—the first day of the annual fest in college—and I’m already quite late because my mother can’t curl my hair into the proper Pinterest Dakota Johnson waves I wanted. I
lose half my inclination to go. My phone keeps buzzing with my friends’ names
splattered on the screen, and I’m trying too hard not to argue with my mom as she
accuses me of being a ‘fashionista,’ which, in her dictionary, means distracted, vain,and unfocused in life—and, in extreme cases, if the opposite gender is involved, morally
depraved. Anyway, after many missed calls and some rusted rage, I leave because I
realize I must escape that premise. I miss meeting two of my friends, one of their
friends, and him. I stay there for a couple of hours and then leave, unaware that the
odds were 1 in 3.

Anyway, on the second day, everything goes a little too well—my mother can wave my
hair properly, I like my dress in the lift, and my Uber is free. And my friend is shy. That’s
the most important part. The odds of my friend being shy can be assumed to be roughly 50%. The chances of her having a sister can be pegged at 11.4%. The odds of his buddy leaving the stall the exact moment we arrive and my friend pestering me to talk to Pat could both be accounted for as half a cent percent. In conclusion, the probability that
we met is a solid 8.3%. And the chances that he would vanish on the third day would be
a third. And in thirty-six universes, it is only in this one that this exact chain of events
could’ve happened. And it did.

And I’m not even counting all the times I could’ve missed him in a crowd, or touched
the same door handle, or a leaf that could’ve fallen on us both, or when we both looked
at the same clock. I’m not even counting all the infinitesimal changes that could have
never let us cross paths. And you know what? None of this means anything, and the fact
that I might never see him again makes this seem like a glitch in the heavenly system.
And big picture, the likelihood of this happening isn’t perhaps all that crazy given we are in the same city or around the same age, but the fact that we were actively dodging it—plunging it from a perfect chance to an 8.3% one—is a little jarring. To think that life could’ve gone in so many different directions by small, seemingly incidental choices is jarring. To think that despite it not meaning anything, it still happened. And in all this, him just being a random character that never made it to the end of my book forms the perfect metaphor for life.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mean to jeopardize your sanity by making your everyday choices look like a mound of historic importance; the beauty of life lies in its mystery and randomness like these. But I guess I just want you to know that even though sometimes it might seem like it’s just you who is alive and not the world, or the
opposite, or that the writer of your story has gone to sleep, in all senses, each step is a
step to someplace. And it is stupid of us to think that it is linear—either forward or
backward. Maybe we are all meandering in patterns we realize only as we make them.

All the synchronicities in the universe that bent like a willow, for you and your best
friend to meet, unaware of the cinematic lore you were about to create that no one
cares about (unless you are former Chief Minister Jayalalitha and Sasikala, of course)or
your favourite song being made and released on the app you know about with the
internet you can afford—none of these mean nothing until you give them a shape in theform of numbers or patterns. Our brain dreads the unknown or the uncertain. Any
unfinished, random shape makes no sense to us, so we just assume it’s nothing to save
ourselves from all the anxiety. But the world is filled with it.

If you don’t know, most of the flowers that exist in this world have petals that follow the
Fibonacci sequence. Branches are fractal images of trees, and so is a coastline. 80% of
results come from 20% of causes. Every circle’s circumference, when divided by its
diameter, always gives you the same never-ending constant. This guy Alan Turing was literally able to come up with an expression that could generate the patterns on zebras and leopards. Given infinite time, the chances of a random, fully formed brain
appearing out of pure chaos are not zero. That means, statistically, it’s possible that
you’re not actually a human who lived a full life, but just a randomly formed mind that
popped into existence with fake memories (I might have just made Pat up and the joke’s prolly on you) Which means, statistically, any
randomness can be a part of the bigger scheme of things if we can just give it a shape.
Maybe the existentialists, poets and the geriatric optimists are all right—Chance is just a bully you later fall in love with as Destiny.

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