Jurassic Park is one of my favorite movie franchises, even the newer Jurassic World spin on things. I love the impossible nature of it, the imagination required to create it and enjoy it as an adult. As always, the original books (by Michael Crichton) are better than their movie counterparts.
Dr. Ian Malcom is played by Jeff Goldblum in the Jurassic Park movies. He has a line in the first film where, in response to hearing that there are only female dinosaurs on the island so that natural reproduction cannot occur, he says "life finds a way."
His point was that while man may think he is in control of making natural reproduction impossible on the island, if life wants to continue outside of that boundary then continue it shall and there is nothing man can do to stop it. And sure enough, dinosaur eggs are found out in the wild of the island, outside of the boundaries established by man: life found a way.
So much of life seems and feels random to me. Yes, plans are made and executed, goals are set and achieved or missed, we wake up do what we want or need to do and then go to sleep. We mostly feel like we are in control of everything going on, especially what we can control, which is ourselves. That much is true. We do have a fairly solid amount of control over how we do things, why we do them, when, where, etc. But what we cannot control is everything else.
We have no control over what someone else will say, do, or think. We, unfortunately, have no control over the hundreds of drivers we are around on the busy roads every day...our life is held precariously in the hands of the mom driving her mini-van, bursting at the seams with kids and crumbs and smelly diapers, trying to keep it together and focus on the road.
Driving is a really good example of this. Most of the time we make it. We get in our car, start the car (it starts), we put it in drive and we head off to our destination. A majority of the time we get to where we are going without incident. But a small fraction of the time something will happen that will impact the rest of our day. And it doesn't need to be anything monumental like a horrific accident. On the contrary, it can be something that doesn't impact your speed or car or arrival time whatsoever, like running over a squirrel that decided to play chicken and lost.
This happened to me back in 2020. My day was going along quite well and then this squirrel shoots out from the side of the road and I had no time to safely react...bump bump...I look in my mirror and there he is, twitching in the road but mostly flat. That messed with my day. Why did he decide to go into the road then? What made him go? Why was I there at that exact moment? Why was it his day to become roadkill?
Life finds a way, or in this case death. The point though is that we are not in control.
Another strange and trivial example. I thought my haircut yesterday was scheduled for 4:30. Turns out it was at 3:30, they called when I was late and asked how soon I could be there. So I arrived at 4:00, a full 30 minutes before what I thought was my scheduled time. The cut ended up taking twice as long as usual. Had I had a 4:30 appointment I would have been thirty minutes late to my 5:00 commitment, but by getting there 30 minutes earlier (which was actually 30 minutes late) I was on time for 5:00. Life finds a way.
What needs to be done will be done. What needs to occur shall. How? We don't know. That is mostly out of our hands. All we can do is what we always do, make plans, execute on those plans, and continue from there. The details of how everything will work out (big and small) is not up to us, not really.
Life is a mystery, but it does find a way.