Probability

I am a very mathematical person, and I often view life as a probability distribution. Each event has a certain probability associated with it, and the lower the probability the less chance there is that it will happen. For instance, the probability of a meteor coming to strike me out of the sky is so small that it is almost zero, and I can say with relative certainty that I will not be struck by a meteor today. However, the chance that I eat a bagel today is relatively high, since I have eaten a bagel at school for the past 3 years. Therefore, I can be fairly certain that I will eat a bagel today. However, sometimes something happens that reminds us that even if the probability is extremely small, it can still happen.

At the beginning of last summer, my family and I traveled to Paris for a family vacation. At the same time, I knew that a group of kids from my grade were traveling on a school trip to Paris the same week. However, the dates only overlapped for two days, and since the kids on the trip did not have cell phones or Internet access, there was no way for me to know where the other Uni kids would be, and Paris is a pretty big city.

However, the universe decided to go against probability. On the second to last day of my trip, our family decided to go to some museum that was about a 20 minute walk from our hotel room. We set off, but about 5 minutes into the walk it began to rain, so we took refuge in an old church nearby and admired the stained glass in the church. We stayed there for about 30 minutes before we decided to continue on to the museum. We didn't want to use the subway because we were running out of metro tickets and didn't want to buy more. When we were about 2 minutes away from the museum, we decided we were feeling a bit hungry, so we looked around for a place to eat. We saw a decent looking restaurant about a block off the road we were traveling on, so we decided to go there for lunch. At the same time, the Uni kids, just arrived in Paris, were emerging from a subway because they had to wait before their rooms were ready. They saw me with my family, and called me over, where we chatted fora bout 10 minutes before I went off to my lunch. The chances that we would run into each other on this random street in Paris are exponentially small. A million factors could have prevented the meeting; if it hadn't rained, if we had decided to use the subway, if we didn't go get lunch, and countless others.

Now it was a pleasant surprise that we saw them once, but I had serious doubts that we would see them again. But the universe thought otherwise. The morning I was supposed to go home, my plane happened to be delayed by 5 hours, but we didn't find out until we were already awake and eating breakfast. Since I had nothing else to do, I decided to go walk in the Luxembourg gardens, since they were less than a 5 minute walk from my hotel room. I was walking around the gardens when I noticed that somebody sitting on one of the benches looked familiar. I then realized that it was Mr. Garvey, and that meant that the rest of the Uni students were around the gardens somewhere. The Uni students had happened to go to the Luxembourg gardens at the exact same time I did. Once again, the odds against this were huge, but it still happened, not once, but twice. So even though everything can be assigned a probability, there is always a chance, no matter how small, that any event may come to pass.