In recent years I’ve noodled more on the role of place in our lives, and the role of luck.
I grew up with in a relatively rural part of West Virginia. I spent many hours tramping around in the woods along the Ohio River, and even more hours reading books at the house. My parents moved into that community when I was five. I think we were always politely considered outsiders and not “from there” right through my high school graduation. Our family lived at the edge of Appalachia. I could escape its gravitational pull more easily than most of the people living there.
I had an early grasp on the core dignity of this community even amidst brokenness, bigotry, and pain. They were proud and people knew how to work. There were things to admire and awful things I wanted to flee. I was eager to move out and be among more enlightened people who would help me on my path to winning a Nobel Prize.
It wasn’t until I moved to Cleveland for college that I understood a bajillion people considered me an uncultured hick.
This was the period I first began considering the role of luck in my life. What if my parents had not met in college and married? What are the odds that one sperm cell from my father successfully fertilized the egg cell, and all the development proceeded in utero? What if cleft palate surgery had not been available? What if I did not have two loving parents? What if I had been born in a different country? What if my teacher had laughed and embarrassed me when I wrote that essay about winning the Nobel Prize – would I have pursued science? What if I had been maimed or killed in those “I should have died” moments? How much luck and random factors am I not even aware of?
I’ve considered all the later steps in my life, too – grad school choice, meeting my wife, kids, moving to Iowa for a new job, friends, churches, mentors, international travel experiences, some medical incidents. Many, many things could have gone so differently. The interaction of place, people, and luck is extraordinarily dense.
What do I conclude? I should call it all unmerited grace.
You can extend this thinking to grand historical events. What if China had continued exploring west past India and Ethiopa in the 1400s, instead of turning inward for centuries? What if Spain and Portugal never found gold in South America? What if the Spanish Armada had succeeded? What if Britain had re-acquired the United States in the 1790s or in the War of 1812? What if the Roman empire had endured another 600 years, or the Nazis continued to rule Europe rather than be defeated? And on and on. Major historical trends pivot on peculiar events.
As Han Solo told Luke Skywalker, “Don’t get cocky, kid.”
