Recently, I've been thinking about making decisions and control...and how others' decisions affect our own - you know, the usual cyclic conundrums into which I am so easily swept. But as I thought about it more, I began to wonder about what happens when we reach the point where we don't want to deal with it anymore. You know, when you're so tired of looking at or thinking about something that you say, "I've done all I can do, so I'm just going to leave it all to chance."
Leave it all to chance.
What is chance, anyway? When we decide to let chance determine our next step, what is really happening? Just because we no longer have the ability to be (or simply choose to not be) directly involved does not mean that some omnipotent chance is in control...or does it? At this point, we might say, "Oh yes - God is chance. Or, at least, God steps in at those moments."
It makes sense, but what about all of those other factors that we didn't consider the first time? Let's say you're completing a job application. When you finally submit it (for the sake of the example, we're assuming the application is online), it is out of your hands and you no longer have control over the situation. (This is the point where you say you will leave it all to chance.) As a part of your application, you had to upload your résumé and answer some questions about why you are a good fit for the job, etc. You know it wasn't dazzling, but with the right hiring manager, you might have a shot.
Enter the hiring manager. Yes, the hiring manager probably has a set of guidelines for narrowing down the search for employees, but the selection process also inevitably depends on the hiring manager's current frame of mind. There are so many things that play into this. Consider two scenarios for the hiring manager's morning:
1) found out that his/her sister is stuck in the airport because of snow delays and flat tire on the way to work; 2) notified that he/she won a raffle for $1000 and made it to work without hitting any red lights. It is easy to see how either one of these two scenarios might put a person in a different mood than the characteristic monotonous mediocrity. And since humans are never truly free of bias, an altered frame of mind could covertly determine the open-mindedness of the hiring manager, thus affecting the survival rate of your application.
Notice that everything that might have affected the hiring manager's morning was largely dependent upon things exterior to himself/herself. Let's say that the hiring manager woke up that morning and said, "I hope today goes well, but I'll just leave it all to chance."
Here we go again.
It would seem as if our chance is also dependent upon others' actions. So when we say we are leaving it all to chance, we're leaving it up to other people, and ultimately, to God.
So does chance exist at all?
