Night Journey to Randomland

Honest reflection reveals that our lives are entanglements with chaos. A positive spin might say that lives are a kind of tourism, like a visit to Disneyland, but life on earth is much more like a visit to Randomland. 

What happens is that we are born and then we cope, more or less successfully, until the trip is finally over. That short word, cope, has a lot of heft, of course. It summarizes, using a mere four letters, what amounts to an amalgam: a mishmash of reflexive and of thoughtful actions, of lucky choices and of grievous error, the embrace of impulses and the reluctant resistance of others. Viewed in retrospect, in detail, honestly, that coping isn’t actually pretty at all. But as we have gifts for coping so also we are talented biographers. We shape and ornament the story of our life so that it seems to make a lot more sense than it actually does. We “neglect” our errors and “highlight” the positive. The stories that emerge are, largely, tales of heroism. They are nicely understated—indeed sometimes they are understated so that they sound understated, but the heroism shines right through.

The chaos is most to the fore in those years from early teens to early adulthood. Most of us are lucky. We had good parent who steered our childhood through safe channels—but there are many who’re not so lucky. By early adulthood most of us have formed useful habits; these then more or less guide us—except for those eruptions that later we view as temporary insanities.

I’ve marveled at people who appear to have conventional lives—until, with growing wisdom, I’ve realized that even the most ordered, conventional, successful, and respectable careers are mere appearance—if only we knew the details. The random is hidden in these lives as well.

Although the experience is humbling, sobering, sometimes it’s useful to look at that biography of ours through a critical lens. Sometimes it happens when we awaken at three in the morning and can’t immediately go back to sleep again. And sometimes, thankfully rarely, panoramas of the past then open that at least hint at what might happen after we pass over the borders of the zone from Randomland to Otherland and undergo what people who have experienced them call a “life review.”