The utter random-ness of it

 A light fixture falls from the ceiling on the head on my friend who is standing in the lobby of his apartment building waiting for an elevator. Happily, it is only a glancing blow.

A dear friend of a dear friend, out for a lovely dinner with her husband, chokes on a piece of meat. Hollywood versions notwithstanding, the Heimlich maneuver fails.

My husband, whose newest book is enjoying more success than any of his (notable) others, is diagnosed with a weird cancer than comes from nowhere, is caused by nothing. And is incurable.

The utter, confounding randomness of it. The heart-breaking randomness of it. The rage against the universe-ness of it.

And yet, we fool ourselves into thinking that life makes sense, that it has order, that we have control. We have to in order to move forward, to make decisions. To live in this world. And, really, how hard is it hard to fool ourselves? In fact, among the haphazard, the accidental, the arbitrary, and the senseless, there is order: We function within 24-hour days and 12-month years. The grass grows. The tides come in and recede. Oranges are orange. We sweat when it’s hot. We shiver when it’s cold. It makes sense.

And we do, we can, exercise control: We set alarm clocks and awaken at the hour we want to. We decide what to eat for dinner and cook it.  We wear our favorite red shirt because we decide to wear our favorite red shirt. Where is the helplessness in that? Where is the chaos in that?

And then--oh I don’t have to remind you, dear friends, do I?--the unexpected, the planned, the whack upside the head, and we must discard our notions of the universe making sense, with ourselves at the controls.

There’s an exchange at the end of Wes Anderson’s insistently quirky new movie, Asteroid City, that sums it up for me, comforts me and would be on etched on my epitaph if I were going to be buried rather than incinerated (yes, that’s me exercising control even when dead):

“I don’t understand this play,” says one character.

“Just keep telling the story,” responds another.

And so I do. And so do we all.