And yet a hallmark of our complex animal consciousness is our prospective imagination — the ability to tense into the future and everything that could possibly go wrong in it, aware that at any given moment we could be making the wrong choice, aware that even if there were a right one, and even if we had the wisdom to discern it and the will to make it, chance will always play a greater role than choice. This is the price we pay for the chance-miracle of being alive at all, each of us the improbable product of chance events that long prefigure our consciousness and its capacity for choice. (Just ask James Baldwin.) So we find ourselves here, cosmic castaways living with the perennial burden of figuring forward in an uncertain universe, discovering again and again in this burden the greatest blessings of beauty and meaning — the object of every theorem and the subject of every work of art, followed to its deepest source.
Maria Popova